It Must Be Heaven
2019 | 97 minutes | France, Qatar, Germany, Canada, Turkey, Palestine
Director: Elia Suleiman
Writer: Elia Suleiman
Languages: English, French, Arabic
FIORESCI Prize for Best Film in Competition, Cannes Film Festival 2019
As distinctive a filmmaker as you will find in contemporary world cinema, Palestinian writer-actor-director Elia Suleiman brilliantly combines in his narratives of alienation and exile the comedy and pathos of Buster Keaton, the kinetic anarchy of Jacques Tati, and the ruminative power of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Expanding on a his loose trilogy of earlier films that investigated the fate of Palestine (1997’s Chronicle of A Disappearance, 2002’s Divine Intervention, and 2009’s The Time That Remains), his new globetrotting narrative cleverly blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, between Beckettian comedy and brave political investigation.
In It Must Be Heaven, a Palestinian filmmaker named ES (played by Suleiman himself) leaves Palestine to try to find a new homeland. His travels take him to Paris and then to New York. Ever observant, ES finds strange parallels with his original home, discovering odd human behaviours, eccentricities, and incidents not unlike those found there. Along the way, he’s also trying to raise money to make a new film about what is a decidedly offbeat (meta)physical journey.
Episodic and absurdist, Suleiman’s latest incisive, amusing road movie takes on the perils, pratfalls, and possibilities of a now global search for identity. It was awarded a Jury Special Mention at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
- Tom McSorley
Screenings
SATURDAY, MARCH 28
6:45PM
Presented with the support of the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France in Canada
Preceded by the short film
Highway to Heaven
Side by side on B.C.’s Richmond’s No. 5 Road, a.k.a. the “Highway to Heaven”, are numerous houses of worship, including Buddhist temples, a Sikh gurdwara, Hindu and Swami temples, Shia and Sunni mosques, Christian churches, and Jewish, Islamic and Christian schools.
An inversion of It Must Be Heaven where a restless man is wandering westward in search of a new homeland, Highway to Heaven is an observational documentary exploring a single spot on Earth in which seemingly divergent religious ideologies co-exist in peaceful disassociation.