Must Be Paradise is directed by Ilya Suleiman, who was born in Palestine in 1960, and before that has been nominated or won awards at European film festivals for several of his films, including Chronicles of a Disappearing Civilization "(1996) won the Best Debut Award at the Venice Film Festival; "God's Intervention" (2002) won the Cannes Jury Prize and the Fabisi International Film Critics Award; "Time Is Still" (2009) was shortlisted for the 62nd Cannes main competition unit . Elijah Suleiman has a unique style of self-deprecating cold humor. His works are absurd, sometimes serious, and poetic, often reminiscent of Chaplin, Jacques Tati, Buster Key "It Must Be Heaven" continues the above style for the comedy masters such as Dunn and others.
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The film features himself as the protagonist and storyteller as Suleiman leaves his native Palestine in search of a new home — one without the daily violence, roadblocks, and identity checks. So he went to Paris and New York, but things were not as simple as he imagined, and he gradually discovered that these cities and his hometown staged similar plots.
Filmed in Paris, New York and Palestine, the film's themes involve identity, nationality and belonging. The seemingly bland narrative, if you look closely at each passage, hides very interesting information, including many metaphors about politics and descriptions of symbols in various places. The absurdity is full of irony, but at the same time there is no lack of warmth and emotion. one side.
Suleiman, who is also the star and director at the same time, has almost no lines, and uses eyebrows and eyes instead of words throughout the whole process. Suleiman plays an "observer" in the film, sharing his perspective as a Palestinian in the language of video, expressing his own thinking intuitively and leaving room for the audience to follow him and listen to the world with a calm mind. Restless and restless.
The film has a smooth rhythm, follows symmetrical aesthetics and a three-stage structure to concretize political issues. The color matching is comfortable and natural, and even the characters appear in pairs, especially for patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the picture is extremely harmonious.
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In a grim stare, Suleiman pays homage to John Berger, the image unfolding in a timeline whose continuity constructs an irreversible statement of opinion. The angels appearing in the film should have a lot to do with Walter Benjamin's view of history and Paul Clee's "New Angels". As collective memory, the speech of civilization, history is born in the present, and in the storm called "progress", it is too late to pick up the corpses of the past and face the future. As a "state" that "does not exist", Palestine's national identity and collective consciousness are quietly passing away, while a very small number of individuals strive to resist forgetting with memory and retain the last trace of self-identity through culture. A large number of element symbols fill the whole film, such as the neighbor who steals lemons at the beginning, alluding to Israel. Palestine has their own future, but this future is difficult to explore, the grotesque jokes are endless, but they are cruelly real, where they are forgotten, where they are not home, where is the sense of belonging. May Oblivion stay in the world of images forever.
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