Das erste Mal, als ich einen Film des palästinensischen Filmemachers Elia Suleiman sah, war ich sprachlos. Ich spürte ein Kribbeln in der Brust, das mich zu Tränen rührte und gleichzeitig zum Lächeln brachte. Zärtlichkeit, nehme ich an? Schönheit, sicherlich. Der Film war sein neuester, für die Goldene Palme nominierter It Must Be Heaven, eine existenzialistische Komödie, in der der Regisseur von seiner Heimatstadt Nazareth nach Paris und New York reist und dabei auf allerlei seltsame Begebenheiten des täglichen Lebens trifft.

Vom 21. bis 30. Mai zeigt das Arab Film and Media Institute eine Retrospektive von Elia Suleimans Filmen, die man sich kostenlos anschauen kann, wenn man in den USA ist (oder gecheckt hat, wie man sich ein VPN installiert). Wenn nicht, kein Grund zur Traurigkeit, denn hier findest du zehn großartige palästinensische Filme, die man sich kostenlos ansehen kann, darunter Suleimans Debüt Chronicle of a Disappearance von 1996 und The Time That Remains. Dieses Interview mit dem Regisseur, in dem er darüber spricht, wie seine Filme politisch sind, obwohl fast keine Worte fallen, wie meditative Momente seinen Blick auf die Welt prägen, seine Einflüsse (es sind nicht Jacques Tati oder Buston Keaton, mit denen er oft verglichen wird) und das Leben in einer Zeit, die "zunehmend ghettoisiert und atomisiert" ist, sind ein schöner Vorgeschmack auf diese beeindruckende Filmbiografie: 

NOTEBOOK: In recent interviews, you have said that the world is being “palestinianized.” Could you expand on that notion?

SULEIMAN: I have a feeling that the solitude and loneliness that I feel, deep inside of me, regarding what is happening to us globally, is one reason why I wanted to make a film about the palestinianization of the world. Simply because we can all see what is happening. We are all under occupation, in some way or another, but I wanted to emphasize the individual loneliness that each of us is possibly living in. We do talk about governmental politics, about massive protests, about ecology, about consumerism. But I am experiencing it, and I also have the feeling that many people are also experiencing—at least, in my opinion—a lonely moment. A moment that is composed of solitude and loneliness, which we don’t talk about, out of self-conservation, even with our most intimate partners. And that is something that I see in the eyes and the expressions of people, in the feeling of being lost in the world. We don’t talk about this. We talk about the headaches, the big slogans, of our fear that comes from watching media images of ice melting. However, we don’t talk about this really deep emotion of how lost we have become. […]

So my film also approaches this angle—can we potentially console each other from this angle, not simply hold hands at a protest? I love activism, but I'm not an activist. I'm somebody who lives this lonesome moment and I felt it’s not just me living it. (Just like I felt that I’m not the only one that experiences this burlesque humor.) [...]

The minimum that I'm asking for is a possibility for a shared consolation. Trying to maximize the image in terms of pleasure is also a form of consolation. If you imagine now that—well, it doesn't take much imagination to be honest—that we are all living in a ghetto, that we all are under occupation, that we are self-colonialist in our behavior and thinking. So I try to find a way to somehow reach out to this momentum, without targeting a specific outcome, because I don't know how to solve this situation. And my experience now, at this age of maturity, is that nothing solves nothing.