A New York Times preview of Paradise Now, which screens at the Walker on October 2, just after its New York Film Festival appearance, reveals that director Hany Abu-Assad’s fictional tale of two suicide bombers was shot in “the real place and time”–the West Bank city of Nablus in summer 2004. “I think it was a very naïve concept,” he said, “because, in the end, we were in a lot of danger and it could have been a disaster.”
Abu-Assad, who is Palestinian, says the Israeli censors approved the film for release, even though it shows suicide bombers not as crazed automatons but as frustrated people with conviction. “The daily humiliation is so big that people just agree to it,” he said. “The biggest motivation is the feeling of impotence. You are captured in your own city; you can’t do anything about it; you are nothing.” That position–as well as the broad hot-button topic of his film–is sure to stir up controversy wherever it screens.
Read the preview here.
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Earlier: Terrific performance: on the narrative of suicide bombing.