Elia Suleiman On His Nomadic Cinema & IT MUST BE HEAVEN

In It Must Be Heaven, master filmmaker Elia Suleiman toys with the expat’s idea of home. When I first meet Suleiman on a clear fall day in the lobby of Toronto’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, he’s already two coffees-deep, reclining sheepishly in his signature straw hat. Much like his films, Suleiman’s tone is flat and his delivery deadpan, his sartorial style nearly indistinguishable from the cartoonish protagonist he plays. 

It Must Be Heaven hasn’t even had its international release—yet it was submitted for last year’s Academy Awards and received a Special Mention at Cannes Film Festival. The film, Suleiman says, is a satirical take on a character who leaves Palestine as he hops around the globe in search of home, only to find it was Palestine all along. Suleiman says his desire was to pursue the interplay of home and alienation that expats often wrestle with. Something he says, “turned into a form of cinematic metamorphoses” for him. 

Note-taking played an essential role in what became It Must Be Heaven, a cultural pastiche of different cities. After moving to Paris, ‘out of circumstances not by choice’ he admits he began to take notes observing the city, eventually going on to do the same in Beirut, Taiwan, Korea and Japan.

Monique Vigneault for Film Inquiry: Congratulations on the reception of the film. I have to say, as a person who’s spent their life from country to country, it was quite a refreshing film to see. What was your desire to achieve with this film? 

Elia Suleiman: Usually I’m the most skeptical person, and I still am. But I can tell you this, sometimes there is an inner sense. That is, a bit of an intuition that comes early on in life. I think it had to do something with my nomadic existence. I started to write notes when I lived in Beirut, and even in my different corridors around the world. As these notes began to accumulate, I found something fascinating, you know, an interconnection, and at the same time, a disconnection as a disparity.

When I started to write the film it was for a completely different reason. I started to feel that there was something to be talked about the geopolitical situation of Palestine. I wanted to say that checkpoints are now a matter of our everyday life. Globalization has introduced us to violence as a way of everyday. When you go to the airport there’s always police standing by.

Suleiman has a bleak look on his face when he says this. Yet Nazareth remains the constant, unchanging reef of inspiration. Even after the wonderment of discovering the endless blocks and blocks of different joints, corner bars in New York — Nazareth was where he would return to for ideas, sitting for hours on end, filling empty pages. As he was walking through Nazareth, the sentimentalism for a place he’d try to leave came rushing back.

Elia Suleiman: I failed to succeed in my eagerness to rid myself of anything called ‘nationalism.’ Am I diving again into this Palestinianism? I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to be the perfect stranger.

At fifty-seven, Suleiman is still critical of himself, of being an autodidact director; having never gone to film school, or of forming early ideas that seem immature to him. But what he’s most critical of is his melancholy: “You start to have a melancholic or nostalgic longing for a place you want to have, or you think you have, but never really had.”

As an expat, the sense of place pervades Suleiman’s cinema, so much so, he finds himself torn between where he belongs. “It Must Be Heaven” is a result of those ponderings. He says, “Many times, when I’m passing through this [melancholy], whether it be geographical or psychological—I am a little at existential angst. Why am I? Who am I? Why am I here?”

I find this is true for myself. People who leave their homes behind and are constantly nestling into new places, in the process, become this melancholic person. It just sort of happens. Would you say that’s been a key element in your filmmaking? 

Elia Suleiman: Absolutely. You know, it’s a really wide subject. But I can tell you that part of the reason sometimes that you would fall in love with someone has to with this. You know, you might go to Mexico and suddenly you fall in love with a Mexican, but in fact, you’ve fallen in love only with the country.

That’s interesting. How does the sense of place permeate your filmmaking process? Do you find an extension of yourself in other cultures, and in that ‘otherness’? 

Elia Suleiman: I think the first departure to actually belong to so many places is the spiritual journey that you take inside of yourself. It’s when you actually dig deep, in theory, and you find that you are in a kind of connectedness with quite a lot of people and a lot of places. It includes also trying to search for yourself all the time about who you are and who you could potentially become. You have this as the first preparation before departure into more geographic locations. Then, if you open your eyes to the diversity of culture, it becomes a pleasure of the emancipations, you start to belong to every place you go to.

The director has a sorrowful look, but continues: “How we are multiples, how we become otherness, how we are an extension of ourselves that emancipates in different cultures, and how we feel at home and not at home in all of these places. It is when the exotic is not a negative term, that you start to take pleasure from living in the world.”

I notice a sad twinkle in his eye from across the table now: “And that does not exclude the loneliness and alienation, and the frustration quite a lot of times from belonging, and not belonging. This particular borderline, this no man’s land, that does not always feel quite so tender.”

He sits up: “On one level, if you really truly go back to this place you call ‘home’ that you are rooted in, how sure are you that you’re not going to say, ‘I’m becoming a little claustrophobic?’”

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 lockdowns, the theatrical release of It Must Be Heaven has been postponed.