For obscure reasons, It Must Be Heaven begins during an Easter church service that doesn’t go according to script and the bishop leading the congregation has to kick down a door.
Perhaps kicking down a door is a good way to begin a film that few believed could work. The writer-director of It Must Be Heaven, Elia Suleiman, must be gratified that it screened in competition at Cannes last year and was Palestine’s official entrant at the Academy Awards.
When most of what we hear from the Middle East is conflict and strife, a Palestinian comedy may sound to many of us like a contradiction in terms. Suleiman, an award-winning Palestinian filmmaker (Divine Intervention, The Time That Remains) from Israel, shows how hard it is to pitch an idea that runs contrary to expectations.
If, as his friend Gael Garcia Bernal suggests in a cameo as himself, Suleiman’s next film is about peace in the Middle East, that could be a tough sell too.
After the odd start, the protagonist ES – the filmmaker himself – is at home in his flat in Nazareth enjoying a quiet coffee on the balcony. What do you know, there’s a neighbour helping himself to lemons from his garden? ES doesn’t react or even offer a mild protest, he just observes, owl-like behind his spectacles and beneath his panama hat.
Watching the world go by, ES is a silent witness. To customers in a restaurant who behave like gangsters when they don’t like the food. To the gang armed with baseball bats that roams the streets.
Read the review by Jane Freebury in The Courier.