Int: Hany Abu-Assad

Said and Khaled, two young Palestinian men of the West Bank city of Nablus, spend their days working as auto mechanics, drinking tea, smoking hookah and wondering how it must be living in a free country without military posts and the oppression of a foreign army. One day, a middle-aged man approaches them and tells them that their time has come.

It becomes clear that they have been recruited by a Palestinian organization that enrolls martyrs for the liberation cause. Said and Khaled have been chosen to carry out a strike against Israeli people in Tel Aviv. In 24 hours, explosives will be strapped around their belly and they will be sent to Tel Aviv, where they will blow themselves up amongst as big a crowd as possible. Their reward: Paradise and the honor of being celebrated as heros.

Said and Khaled spend their last night with their family, although they are not allowed to reveal their impending mission. In the morning, they say goodbye to their dear ones and are brought to the secret headquarters of the organization, where they have their last meal, record their last speech on camera, and duck-tape explosives all around their bodies.

As they cross the fence that surrounds Nablus, something goes wrong. Said and Khaled are forced to run back to Nablus and lose sight of each other. Finally reunited by the organization, they are given another chance to carry out the strike. But something has changed in the mind of one of the two friends…

Soaked in such a vivid realism as if it were a documentary, and yet built with the tension and suspence of a thriller, Paradise Now. is a subtle, relentless investigation in the ordinary daily life of people forced to live in a situation that is anything but ordinary.

Without expressing any judgment, and with rare balance, honesty and sharpness of vision, helmer Hany Abu-Assad manages to condemn terrorism and yet to take an intimate look inside the mind of two guys who can’t see any other option in their life – and in those of their countrymen. It doesn’t justify the gesture, but tries to understand why. It doesn’t give any easy solution, but raises important questions. “The oppression defines the resistance,” says Said at one point. “If they take the role of oppressor and victim, I have no other choice to be a victim and a murderer as well.”

Of course, we don’t have to agree with this statement, but neither do other characters in the film, such as Suha, a young woman who is in love with Said and wants to convince him that there are other ways of reacting: “This is not sacrifice, it’s revenge!”

Yet, to hear these desperate voices of people who cannot perceive other solutions and are willing to give their own lives for their beliefs is a scary warning and an important reminder of what’s really going on outside our borders.

We met the director, Hany Abu-Assad, at a roundtable interview in New York City.

Q: How did you manage to keep good relationships with both the Israeli army and the Palestinian groups during the shooting?

Hany Abu-Assad: We had a security department dealing with every issue. We had to go through a lot of negotiations, as you can imagine, but our production manager was very smart and always managed to find a way to talk with both sides, the Israeli army and the Palestinians.

Q: Still, shooting in Nablus must have been extremely difficult: six crew members flew back to Europe, your location manager was kidnapped, the set was almost hit by missiles and in the end you had to moved to Nazareth!

HA-A: You know, Nablus is a place under siege. People can’t go in or out without the authorization of the Israeli army. This situation makes people unhealthy. Everybody is so paranoid. I became paranoid as well during the shooting. I started thinking that someone from the crew was spying on me. One of the Palestinian factions thought that we were making a film against the Palestinian cause and its heros, and therefore they kidnapped our manager [who was released only after the intervention of Prime minister Arafat]. Another faction, called Freedom Fighters, thought instead that we were celebrating their resistance, and protected us. When we were shooting the scene of the martyrs’ video, in the very same location where the videos of the real martyrs get shot, they were all around us, and I was very scared that the sequence could offend them. But they weren’t upset at all, and the only time they intervened was to show Ali [Suliman, the actor who plays Khaled] how to carry the weapon. This made me understand that the content of the scene was very authentic and close to reality.

Q: Still, in that scene there’s a lot of black humour. It’s supposed to be a very tense moment, but while Khaled is making his farewell speech, first the camera doesn’t work and he has to repeat his speech several times, and then the members of the organization distract him eating their sandwiches.

HA-A: At first, I conceived the scene in that particular way in order to create a sense or reality, because in real life tragedy and comedy are next to each other. But then I realized that this is actually what happens during martyrs’ video. The Palestinians who were on the set didn’t protest about the scene because this is what they do in real life. They act like if it’s not a big deal at all. And they do that for a practical reason. When martyrs make their speech in front of the camera, they are signing a contract. And their recruiters don’t want to turn it into a holy moment, because they are afraid that the martyrs might reconsider what they are doing and step back.

Q: What is the purpose of your film?

HA-A: We go to the movies to experience things that we would never experience in our life, and to see things from a different point of view. I don’t pretend to change anybody’s mind. If my movie can help in showing the complexity of the situation in Palestine, it’s a good thing, but my goal isn’t to change other people’s minds. My goal is to fulfill my own curiosity about the situation. I want to understand what brings people to take such extreme decisions. My film is not pro or against Israel. If I want to say that I am against Israel, I can use four words to say that, I don’t need to make a 90 minute film, spend 2 millions and risk everybody’s life!

Q: Are you happy of the result?

HA-A: To be honest, I can see a lot of tiny mistakes in this film, but over all I am quite happy of it. I think it’s rather accomplished even as a thriller. You know, in the western culture, a thriller is an artificial genre, because there is no suspense in real life, and you have to create it. But in Palestine, there’s suspence in real life everytime, even if you go out to buy some water. So, I took advantage of this situation and tried to combine an artificial genre with a realistic setting. This way, the suspense is more real, and at the same time, the content of the movie is more accessible.

Q: Visually, the moment of the lunch before the suicide mission seems to intentionally recall the Last Supper (even the same number of people). And, in general, the whole scene is full of religious references, like Jamal, the recruiter of Said and Khaled, telling them: “I will always be with you”. Why?

HA-A: “To kill yourself with your enemy” is a mythical practice recurrent in the Bible. I think for example at Samson, who killed himself amongst the Philistines. Now, this practice is not a story anymore, but has become a reality. I wanted to retell this story not from a God’s point of view, but from a realistic, human one. When Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Last Supper, he let the light come from above, from God. In my Supper, instead, ther light comes from a neon lamp. It’s more casual and realistic. In Leonardo’s painting there’s something holy and trascendent, while I didn’t want to create such a dramatic atmosphere. I wanted it to be more human.

Q: What’s impressing in the film, is that the two main characters are not fanatical at all. They are two very normal guys, not what people might imagine suicide bombers should be.

HA-A: You know, during my research I heard a lot of stories, very human stories that I could hardly believe. A lawyer, for example, who is defending two people who failed a suicide mission and now are in jail, told me their story. They were a boy and a girl, sitting in a car, both with a belt full of explosives around their chests. But the boy didn’t know that the girl was a martyr as well, and when he found out that she was going to blow herself up with him, he refused to do it. He said: “Stop! I am not going to do this with a girl!” She was very angry with him. She thought he was very conservative and machist, but the boy gave her a totally different reason. A respectful one. He told her: “A man can kill for protection, but when a woman starts to kill as well, then there’s something wrong in it, it’s the end of life. Women are supposed to procreate, to bring life. A man can kill to protect his beloved’s life, but a woman is never supposed to kill.” These were the stories I’ve been told, and I was the first one to be surprised by the humanity of them. But then I understood how ignorant I was in the first place, to think that these people were not human being. I realized that everyone can become a suicide bomber if he finds himself in such an extreme situation. Palestinians are perceived as a threat just for living in their country. And that drives some of them insane. What they do is inhumane, but their motivations are very humane.

Q: So, in the end, which is your opinion towards suicide bombers?

HA-A: Even though I am for the freedom of Palestine, I think suicide bombers are making the situation worse. For several reasons. First of all, it’s immoral. You kill yourself with other poor innocent people who are not responsible for the situation. Second, you give your enemy a reason to accuse you of terror amongst the other societies, and at the same time an excuse to perpetrate their injustice towards you. And third, it’s absurd from a strategical point of you. Think about it. You are wasting your best men. Who is a better soldier than someone who is willing to kill himself for his country? And you let your best soldiers kill themselves amongst the most harmless of your enemies, while you don’t hit any of their soldiers. It doesn’t make any sense even from a military point of view!

Q: What do you think about Sharon’s policy of disengagement?

HA-A: As it is, it’s just a bigger cage. Sharon is smart. He made the cage bigger, and presented himself in front of the media as the one who’s making a big step towards the peace process, but the truth is that nothing has changed. Palestinians are going to be again disappointed and I’m afraid they will end up doing something bad, and Israel will use that to prove that Palestinians are the ones who don’t want peace. But I don’t want to criticize everything. In a way, disengagement is a big step. But until there will be equal solution, there will be conflict. Palestinians don’t want to be considered inferiors and will continue fighting until they will be treated as equal. You know what’s funny? Jews survived through history not because of their land, but because they kept their story and culture alive. Therefore, they preserved their identity as a nation. But now they are giving away their story for their land. They are linking their land with their surviving. This will fail. How many nations disappeared with their lands? They are not interested anymore in their stories, they are just focusing on their land, and they risk to lose their culture. They were masters in telling stories. But their greatest myth was the story of the underdog who refuses to be a slave. Problem is, now they have turned into oppressors, and that story is becoming our story.

Q: One of the producers of the film is Israeli [Amir Harel, the producer of Yossy and Jagger and Walk on Water]. Will the film be distributed in Israel?

HA-A: Yes, one of the producers is Israeli, even though we didn’t get any Israeli money. He applied for them, but they were denied. Anyhow, he helped us a lot in the logistic of the production, and now he’s helping us in distributing the film in Israeli cities. It should be released in Israel on the 10th of November.

Q: Can you tell us something about your upcoming project?

HA-A: It’s going to be a tragic-comedy about an Egyptian movie star who gets a role in the new film of Spielberg and is about to move to the US. He is, of course, completely excited. Problem is, these actors are real stars in their countries, but when they come to America they are just given awful roles, say for example a miserable scene in which they have to try to rape Jennifer Lopez and get beaten up by her. You see them all the time. They are in every movie but have only a couple of awful scenes and no face. My film will give these people a face, and hopefully Jennifer Lopez, or someone as famous, will have just a very small part, a quick side scene. I want to tell the story of this unknown actor, who leaves his home where he is celebrated by everybody and gets in a land where nobody cares for him, where even at the Immigration desk is being asked if he is visiting for work, pleasure or terror.

Warner Independent Pictures’ Paradise Now opens October 28th in New York and Los Angeles and will open wider in select markets in the coming weeks.