Elia Suleiman Quotes

Living more intensely, more lovingly, with more camaraderie, that is in itself resistance.

Israel, the Israelis, and the rest of the world have been brainwashed. They don't think of pre-1948, they have no idea Palestinians were in Israel, who we were before '48. As if we were born in 1948 according to them. They have no notion that we had a country, houses, rebelled against the Ottomans and the British. They think history in that region started in that moment.

To think that we are disconnected in some way serves the occupation whether it's through indifference or a distancing. It is a colonial approach of making you a subject and them the spectators. That is disturbing and counterproductive. And then suddenly they are surprised or find it alienating that the microcosmic effects of Palestine are happening in the U.S., France, and England, whether it's from the Islamic movements or immigration factors. Keeping a false purity of their countries will harm them eventually.

The desire to express in an art form and to compose a tableau and vignette whether it's humorous, burlesque, or poetic comes simply from a desire to compose an image for cinema. It is not my fault that when I go to Ramallah there is a checkpoint and therefore it enters my film. Tell me a way to avoid that politicized image. The fact is that the police are everywhere, the army everywhere and occupation is total. Whether it's a love story or a thriller, you place the camera and these realities will cross the frame.

What cinema can do is the reordering of this reality from a certain chaos or from a certain order into an aesthetic dimension.

The Time that Remains is a way of interpreting a certain ambience or emotion. These are the stories that my father told me over the course of fifteen or twenty years. I used to listen to him. From the cowardly part of my character, I'm always in fear of not telling the right story. I'm not interested in making epics.

I think that whatever we express in terms of the potential truth is above all else about mobilizing ourselves for ourselves. We learn about ourselves as individuals. Identification with Palestine is universal and not restricted to geographic boundaries. It's a question of moral and ethical positions vis-à-vis all the injustices that surround us.

I don't really know what people's perception about Palestinians.All art is to better life. We want to create hope and share with others. Create more pleasure, and object to despair. Really it's about that. A space where we can be less aggressed upon.

Someone like myself is not from one place. I am in total identification with the New York, French, and Palestine experience and do not stop at the borders of identity.

I'm trying to use Palestine as a microcosm of the world, but maybe the world is a microcosm of Palestine. We're living in a moment that has lost attachment to the ideology behind boundaries.

Silence can be intimidating, sometimes provocative, sometimes a form of resistance because it dislocates.

I don't want what you see on the screen to just be a brief notion of pleasure but something that lingers. The idea is to have the images revisited. I want it to be something that also enhances the soul. I want the moment of pleasure to produce an attachment.

I try to use fiction in order to reduce the potentiality of something being true. We produce our own memories so I'm not sure of truth.

A lot of narrative films leave you no space for anything else but eating popcorn. I want to go in the complete opposite direction. I have to evacuate all psychology, to be less a protagonist and more a presence.

I don't think there should be a Palestinian state because I don't believe in states.

The problem is that when you grow absolutely certain that all authorities are corrupt, then that would include the Palestinian authorities as well.

To think of a film from the point of view of a tank barrel is already so inhumanly positioned. This is when film can reveal itself scandalously.

Palestine is about how we drink the water, whether we are being ecological or not. Palestine is our way of exercising our daily living. That's what's going to solve the problem of Palestine. It's also how we think of ourselves spiritually. This kind of disconnectedness is harmful to the person who is acting that way and is sometimes annoying.

People in power tend to find poetry dangerous to them because it is dislocating, they can't catch it, can't control it. They prefer coherence, what's blunt and has clarity.

There are a lot of questions that come out of the silence. It is so close to the infinite.

I do not teach history in my films. I don't have a linear point of view or argument. What I do in my films is to live the human experience; human, whether in Nazareth or anywhere else in the world.

I don't particularly have a good memory. I think history is many times just the text written by the victors. I wanted to counter that aspect.

I'm not in the business of saying just one thing about just one place. If you only see Palestine in my films, then I've failed because then I'm just a provincial filmmaker.

Palestine is an extremely familiar place to me. Someone like me who lives everywhere in the world cannot be contained. If my hope and ambitions are in the right place, you can judge that in my films. I want to make films that diffuse any local notion. Cinema criss-crosses borders and check points. If the film is good, then it's universal.

If a person just takes what is socio-political and geographical from the themes of my films then that's not enough. But if the person goes out of the theatre and, for example, makes the dinner he's eating later on, extra nice then I feel that I have succeeded. We have this urge to anaesthetize the moment we're living in.

I am more at peace than I've ever known myself to be. My connectedness to the world is more intense. I am more attentive to the humanity around me.

It's a false illusion that we wake up thinking of who we are in terms of identity and that we are stuck in the boundaries of who we are nationalistically.

I don't think you can strategize to be poetic and neither can you strategize to be funny. It is not a tool, it is itself - it comes from the moment, from the character, from the background, from the streets.

It's crucial to choose your work place - some places lend themselves to you and others don't.

It's important for me to not historicize. I work to diffuse the issue of identity and to intensify identification. You have to lose your authority in the making of a film to achieve this. The film is about me being absolutely dislocated. I focus on the very personal to arrive at the very political.