Hungarian filmmaker Dorka Vermes, whose debut feature “Árni” was nominated for a Queer Lion Award at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, is developing her sophomore effort, “Places Half Empty,” a film that’s billed as a controversial and intimate portrait of a queer relationship in the context of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
The film, which won the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award this week at the Sarajevo Film Festival’s CineLink industry strand, follows Noá, an independent but struggling thirtysomething working as an illegal cab driver. One night she picks up an affluent young suburban woman, Juli, who is desperately trying to break free of her overbearing family.
The two women quickly fall in love, but a range of circumstances — from growing financial stress to societal pressure to the expectations of Juli’s controlling family — complicate their romance. “Places Half Empty” poses the question of how to find one’s place in a society that offers no room to be different.
Speaking to Variety in Sarajevo, Vermes described the film as a “close-up of an intimate relationship” drawn from her own personal experiences and from her interest in “the subtle, everyday gestures that normalize exclusion.”
“The Hungarian context is not just a backdrop, but a structuring force: shaping choices, movement, speech,” she said. “This is not a film ‘about queerness,’ but an inquiry into how space and politics shape the very conditions of love.”
Directed by Vermes and written by Sára Törley-Havas, “Places Half Empty” is produced by Evelyn Balogh and Botond Lelkes for Budapest-based Non Lieu Film Productions, which takes its name from the French phrase for “non-place.” Lelkes, who founded the company in 2022, said the expression “represents our current situation,” with Hungarian filmmakers working in the places that are “in-between” and “non-existent.”
Lelkes launched the production outfit after the Hungarian government placed control of Budapest’s University of Theater and Film Arts — known by its Hungarian acronym, SZFE — into the hands of Orbán loyalists. That controversial decision sparked a movement among young filmmakers and artists who “wanted to continue the values and the legacy of the old institution,” according to Balogh.
Lelkes and Vermes were among the students who occupied university buildings and resisted the government takeover. That, in turn, led to the creation of the FreeSZFE Society, an association designed to support artistic freedom in a country where it’s increasingly under threat. The association was the first funding body to support “Places Half Empty,” which the filmmakers plan to finance independently.
That’s part of a growing trend in Hungary, where critics say the influence of the repressive Orbán regime has impacted funding decisions at the state-backed National Film Institute, which controls the purse strings for the local industry. Recent films such as Gábor Reisz’s Venice premiere “Explanation for Everything” and Bálint Szimler’s “Lesson Learned,” which bowed in Locarno, became festival breakouts despite being financed without government support.
Balogh credits the determination of a generation of filmmakers who refuse to “complain about money” with bolstering this new wave of Magyar movies. “The destruction of the institution and its values created such a void that the people who were there at the time felt the need to [respond],” she said. “To stick together, create, think outside the box, try to find other ways [to make movies].”
Despite the heavy political context in which they’re launching their film, Lelkes insists that “Places Half Empty” is “not just about the struggle of the Hungarian people,” describing the film as an “absurd melodrama” stocked with “interesting” characters and oddities, such as Juli’s family business raising chihuahuas. Vermes’ longtime mentor Béla Tarr, who served as creative producer on her debut, “Árni” (pictured), will join forces with the filmmaker once again, this time as executive producer.
Sarajevo’s CineLink Industry Days marked the first time the filmmakers presented “Places Half Empty” to an industry audience, and on the strength of its award-winning debut, Balogh saw the event as a rousing success.
“We had a great chance to connect with producers, sales agents and all kinds of industry professionals who were interested in our story and wanted to help us try to untangle this situation that we are in,” she said. Despite the challenges they face, she added, Hungarian filmmakers want to remind the world: “We are here.”
The 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival is wrapping up late on Friday after the unveiling of this year’s winners. The Heart of Sarajevo for the best feature film went to Wind Talk to Me, directed by Stefan Đorđević, while Ivette Löcker’s Our Time Will Come won the best documentary feature prize.
Mashing fiction and documentary, Wind Talk to Me stars its Serbian director and his family. “Stefan reunites with his family to celebrate his grandmother’s birthday for the first time since his mother recently passed away,” reads a synopsis. “This homecoming, driven by Stefan’s urge to complete a film about his mother as well as an attempt to make amends by rescuing a stray dog, will ignite an introspective journey.”
In his acceptance speech, Đorđević mentioned recent unrest and violent clashes between anti-government protesters and police in Serbia against the country’s beleaguered pro-Moscow President Aleksandar Vučić and the government. Peaceful demonstrations started in November after a railway station collapse killed 16 people, with critics blaming corruption and cost savings. In recent days, the situation has turned violent as supporters of the president and government staged counter-protests, and riot police was deployed.
“I dedicate this to my mother, but also to all the mothers who are staying up all night in Serbia worrying about their kids on the streets being beaten brutally and arrested,” he director said about his Sarajevo best feature film award.
Our Time Will Come, whose director discussed the film with THR earlier in the week, follows an interracial couple for a year. “Siaka from Gambia and his wife Victoria have returned to their adopted ‘homeland’ of Austria to build a stable existence and start a family,” notes its synopsis. “Both invest a large part of their energy in achieving their shared utopia, but cultural differences remain significant, social structures remain immobile, and their own history and traditions are just as hard to shake off.”
Our Time Will Come
Courtesy of sixpackfilm
Ivana Mladenović was honored as best director for Sorella di Clausura. Plus, the best actress and actor awards were bestowed upon the ensemble cast of director Kukla’s Fantasy, namely Sarah Al Saleh, Aline Juhart, Mina Milovanović, and Mia Skrbinac, and Andrija Kuzmanović for his role in Yugo Florida, respectively.
The festival’s four competition sections – for feature, documentary, short and student films – screened 15 world, six international, 28 regional and two national premieres. A total of 50 films competed for the Heart of Sarajevo awards.
Sarajevo Film Festival director Jovan Marjanović and his team also once again brought the stars to the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Willem Dafoe, Stellan Skarsgard, and Ray Winstone received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo honor at the festival, as did Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino. The works of Russia-born director and artist Ilya Khrzhanovsky and Sorrentino were also featured in curated retrospectives of their films.
Check out all the winners of the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival below.
HONORARY HEART OF SARAJEVO Willem Dafoe Ray Winstone Stellan Skarsgård Paolo Sorrentino
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST FEATURE FILM Wind Talk to Me, directed by Stefan Đorđević
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DIRECTOR Ivana Mladenović, Sorella di Clausura
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST ACTRESS Sarah Al Saleh, Aline Juhart, Mina Milovanović, Mia Skrbinac, Fantasy
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST ACTOR Andrija Kuzmanović, Yugo Florida
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM Our Time Will Come, directed by Ivette Löcker
Special Jury Award In Hell With Ivo, directed by Kristina Nikolova
Special Mention I Believe the Portrait Saved Me, directed by Alban Muja
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY FILM The Men’s Land, directed by Mariam Bakacho Khatchvani
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST SHORT FILM Winter in March, directed by Natalia Mirzoyan
Special Mention Eraserhead in a Knitted Shopping Bag, directed by Lili Koss
HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST STUDENT FILM Tarik, directed by Adem Tutić
BEST YOUTH PERSPECTIVES AWARD DJ Ahmet, directed by Georgi M. Unkovski
SPECIAL AWARD FOR PROMOTING GENDER EQUALITY God Will Not Help, directed by Hana Jušić
PARTNERS’ AWARDS
European Film Academy Short Film Candidate Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World Directors: Kevin Walker, Irene Zahariadis
CICAE (International Confederation of Art Cinemas) Award White Snail Directors: Elsa Kremser, Levin Peter
Cineuropa Prize DJ Ahmet Director: Georgi M. Unkovski
Yugo Florida, TV series veteran Vladimir Tagić’s feature film directorial debut, celebrated its world premiere during the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival that wraps up on Friday.
The title of the father-son drama refers to a car model, which is somewhat of a mirror of the state of its protagonist. Just check out the synopsis: “Zoran’s awkward, almost pointless life – which features a pothead roommate, an unavailable ex-girlfriend, and a job on reality TV – is turned upside down when his estranged and intolerable father is diagnosed with a terminal illness and Zoran commits himself to helping him through his final weeks.”
Tagić wrote the screenplay with Milan Ramšak Marković. The cast features popular Serbian TV comedian Andrija Kuzmanović, Nikola Pejaković, Snježana Sinovčić Šiškov, and Goran Slavić.
The Serbian director sat down with THR in Sarajevo to discuss the inspirations for the movie, the car and reality TV references, and his next film idea.
Going from TV series to film wasn’t a big leap for Tagić. “The movies are the thing that I always wanted to do,” he shared. “I just needed a lot of time to finance the movie. It’s not that easy, especially when you are a first-time director, to find financing. That’s why I just grabbed the chance to work on TV shows when I got the chance.”
His own experiences inspired the movie. “One year before my father got sick and died, an uncle of mine was sick, and I went to the hospital to visit him, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not ready for my parents to get sick’,” he recalled. “And then, three or four months later, my father got sick. And during the last six months of his life, I experienced the strongest feelings that I have ever experienced.”
Continued the filmmaker: “Your whole world is going upside down, and you have this illusion in your head that you are maybe learning something for life. That’s the way our brain functions. We want to make sense out of everything. We want to find the reason. So, you’re telling yourself that this has to have a meaning. ‘I will become a better person. I will understand to appreciate life more. I will be a better son to my mother, or better brother to my sister or better boyfriend to my girlfriend,’ whatever. But that’s an illusion. That is not true.”
Tagić realized that he had never seen a movie tackle this “idea that a painful experience doesn’t mean that it’s a learning experience. Maybe it’s just pain, and it’s okay to accept that.” Explained the director: “Zoran is this guy who is searching for a way to change his life, to find the meaning to. He’s saying [at one point in the movie]: ‘I’m more mature now.’ But in the end, he realizes that he’s not really.”
Making Yugo Florida helped the creator. “That was something I needed to do to let it out,” he highlighted. “That was my kind of catharsis. I think that this process helped me to let it go and to continue with my life. That experience for me was cathartic in a way, because I’m not a guy who’s going to go to psychotherapy.”
‘Yugo Florida’
Courtesy of Sarajevo Film Festival
So, what’s up with the title Yugo Florida? It turns out that is the name of a hatchback car model from Yugoslav automaker Zastava that was produced between 1987 and 2008. “The car has such an exotic name,” Tagić said. “In that name, you are putting Yugoslavia and Florida right next to each other, and it’s a strange combination. What is Yugo fucking Florida? That name was just so funny to me. It’s absurd because it sounds exotic, but it’s the shittiest car in the world.”
It may want to inspire the sunny beaches of Florida and the heat of Miami, “but essentially, it’s the shittiest, crappiest car in the world,” he concluded. “So for me, that was the perfect metaphor for my main characters and their lives. Their lives are full of imperfections, full of things that they don’t understand and problems that they cannot fix, and they don’t know why. And that car is like that.”
Zoran’s reality TV job is a reference to the filmmaker’s personal life. “That was the job that I did right after I finished film school,” Tagić told THR. “I was doing Big Brother reality. And those long night shifts, which you see in the movie, drove me completely crazy. I was in some perpetual state of insomnia,” just like Zoran.
“His main problem is loneliness,” the director continued. “And Paul Schrader, the famous screenwriter I really admire, says what a job in a movie represents and how, when he’s writing a character, he’s thinking about the job that he’s doing as a metaphor for the inner problem of that character. It’s the same thing in Taxi Driver or American Gigolo or First Reformed. So I was thinking what is the perfect job to represent the loneliness of a main character, and then it just clicked – it’s perfect to have a guy who is watching other people, including when they sleep, in black-and-white.”
Tagić already has a new movie idea and screenplay with his Yugo Florida writing partner. “It’s a story that is, in a way, a mirror to this story,” he told THR. “This story was about my relationship with my father, and the next one is going to be about the relationship between my mother and my sister. So I’m going to make the female version of Yugo Florida. I mean, it’s going to be a completely different movie, but, in my head, it’s like a duo. There is a kind of connection.”
Based on a short story and script by Stefan Bosković, Bosnian helmer Srdan Vuletić’s Otter (Vidra) tells the story of a 16-year-old girl named Hana who has to face two major traumas, in addition to the expectations of her mother and extended family. Vuletić’s directorial debut, Summer in the Golden Valley, also featured a 16-year-old, a boy who must repay his late father’s debt. In his latest, Hana must cope with the death of her father, whose final wish was to be buried in a space suit. Matthew McConaughey has no role in the movie, but he gets referenced in Otter (more about that later).
“A reserved teenager, Hana, has been invited by her crush, Balsa, to go to a lake with him to film a solar eclipse. On the morning of their planned trip, however, Hana’s father, a top-notch pilot, dies,” reads a synopsis for the film, which celebrated its world premiere at the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival. “In his will, Hana’s father requests that he be buried in a space suit. Frustrated by her mother’s inability to stand up to the rest of the family, who want to give her father a traditional funeral, Hana runs away from home and goes to the lake.” She wants to have a good time with Balsa and his friend and social media star Luka, only to be disappointed and experience violence. “Hana must suppress her considerate and obedient nature or her destiny will be as dark as the solar eclipse.”
Vuletić has been busy after a 17-year “break” of sorts. “Many people think I took a break from filmmaking, but in essence, I was stuck with the production of one of my previous films,” he told THR during an interview at the Sarajevo festival. “It was that movie, Gym, that I premiered last year. Remember this saying, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’? And I made this mistake.”
He reacted by starting to develop many things at the same time, “and it all came to fruition more or less over the span of five years,” Vuletić explained. “So in the last four years, I did two series as a creator and two feature films. But before that was not really a break. I did some theater performances as a director and some documentary things. So it was not that I was on holiday.”
Srdan Vuletić
Courtesy of Sarajevo Film Festival
What is the story behind the space suit? “That was not in the early script version,” the director told THR. “It came along as a solution that I asked the script writer to make. We had a movie about a girl facing trauma. And I told him it’s somehow too linear for me to have only one trauma. I didn’t want Hana to have any respite. So then we brought this big trauma inside the house.”
An otter captured in a box also plays a key role in the film. “One thing I changed right before shooting was that I thought maybe it would not be good to see the otter as an animal in a physical presence,” Vuletić shared with THR. “The otter symbolizes her trauma.”
In a later scene, the otter can be seen but only in animated form. The director planned for this animated sequence early on. “I wanted to make a movie that’s different from the rest of regional cinematography,” explained Vuletić. In consultations with others, “this animation thing clicked,” he recalled. “It’s a moment where we enter her inner world. It’s the moment when she finally understands that she should not run from her problems. It’s a moment of change when she says, ‘OK, my first step in solving the problems is to recognize I have a problem and to face it’.”
So what does McConaughey have to do with Otter? There’s a scene in which Luka’s looks are compared to those of the famous actor. But Vuletić says another Hollywood star was initially planned to get name-checked in that scene. “There was another actor we had in mind for this role of Luka, and this guy resembles Sean Penn,” the filmmaker told THR. “And then for a long time in the script, it was Sean Penn. Then, when we decided to have Pavle Marković, a great, great actor, play Luka, I said, ‘Listen, I think it doesn’t fit his character to say some name that he really resembles. Let’s say a name that he thinks he looks like.’ McConaughey. For some reason, that name came up.”
Berlin-based Austrian filmmaker Ivette Löcker (Night Shifts, Ties That Bind) likes to go deep on human relationships and connections.
“My previous films have very often dealt with relationships, different kinds of relationships,” she tells THR on the sidelines of the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, where her latest documentary, Our Time Will Come (Unsere Zeit wird kommen), screens in the feature documentary competition program. “And I was very much interested in this kind of interracial relationship, because I think it’s getting more and more common. As members of the white majority, we have to get used to and get to know more about these kinds of relationships.”
The synopsis on the Sarajevo festival website sums up the movie’s focus this way: “After years of uncertainty and involuntary exile, Siaka from Gambia and his wife Victoria have returned to their adopted ‘homeland’ of Austria to build a stable existence and start a family. Both invest a large part of their energy in achieving their shared utopia, but cultural differences remain significant, social structures remain immobile, and their own history and traditions are just as hard to shake off.”
The website of the Berlin Film Festival, where the movie world premiered, described it as “the portrait of a love between cultures that endures despite all difficulties in an Austria increasingly moving towards authoritarianism” amid the rise of a populist right-wing party. “Racism is a sickness,” Siaka says in letting off steam in one scene of the doc.
The film mixes observational filming with interviews with Victoria, Siaka and the couple together. And it takes viewers from Vienna to Gambia. Löcker doesn’t use any label for her cinematic style, but highlights that in addition to fly-on-the-wall scenes and conversations with the couple, she also typically likes to “pursue a quiet, rather poetic style of visuals.”
“For me, it’s a [story] of modern love, because it’s so common to not live in your home country anymore,” Löcker explains.
Ivette Löcker
Courtesy of Diagonale/Jürgen Keiper
The genesis of the film is very unusual. “I was approached by this couple, which was very new for me,” the director recalls. “They asked if their story could be an interesting topic for a documentary film. I was thrilled to get to know them.” The back story is that Löcker had met Victoria at an Austrian film festival, Diagonale in Graz, in 2017, that screened “her short experimental film before my feature film,” namely Victoria’s short film Kanten (Grenzen) before Löcker’s Ties That Bind.
“We met at the festival, and then that same year, she met her now-husband, and we just stayed in contact,” Löcker explains. Years later, Victoria wrote to her to share that the couple was now married and that her husband had an interesting immigrant story. And she asked if Löcker or someone she knew may be interested in documenting his, and their, story.
“When we had research interviews via Zoom, because it was still during the pandemic, I realized that it is very fascinating how they, as a couple, deal with each other, how they communicate, how they try to bridge cultural differences. I wanted to tell [a film] about these challenges, so I asked them if they could imagine giving us insight into an interracial couple. I am very happy that they agreed to this.”
The filmmaker followed the couple for a year after Siaka had received his residency and work permits. “For me, it was interesting to portray them in a year when these kinds of questions and struggles were already more or less behind them, because my premise was: How do they deal with everyday life?” While Löcker initially expected a focus on the couple, that theme expanded to a focus on family. “After all, especially Siaka was longing for a child and family. So, this topic or theme was getting more and more important for the film.”
Löcker also wanted to tell a more global story. “Our goal was to make a film that has, of course, the specific story with their specific problems, but that also shows more so that people can relate from wherever they may be or be from, whether they have migrant stories or not. I think people can relate to these kinds of challenges.”
What’s next for the filmmaker? “I have a new project, and we will try to start the financing process on it in September,” Löcker tells THR and teases some details about the project. “It will be about female friendship. This time, I will work with more protagonists, which is something rather new for me.”
The Palestinian filmmaker, who will receive the honorary Heart of Sarajevo award at the 2024 Sarajevo Film Festival, has spent his career chronicling the experiences of his people, and the politics of the troubled Middle East. His features: Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996), Divine Intervention (2002), The Time That Remains (2009) and It Must Be Heaven (2019), avoid polemics by using deadpan humor and minimal dialogue, with a focus on the everyday resistance of ordinary people.
That resistance is personified by Suleiman’s on-screen character “E.S.,” a silent, Buster Keaton-like figure who bears witness to the absurdities of life as experienced by Israeli Arabs (such as himself, he was born in Nazareth in 1960) and the citizens of Gaza as a window into the wider world.
Since the Oct.7 attacks by Hamas on Israel and the Israeli bombing and land invasion of Gaza, the wider world is again watching as violent men decide the fate of the region.
Being a Palestinian artist, says Suleiman, “puts you in a kind of an alienated position vis-à-vis the world, as you wonder about the horrors happening in Palestine and the governments that are supporting that horror.” But amid the darkness, the director remains surprisingly hopeful about the possibility for change, and of art as a form of resistance. “Art marches a lot slower than bullets,” he says. “We might not see change in our lifetime, [but] the accumulation of production of culture that inspires freer people might eventually have some kind of result.”
Congratulations on the honor at Sarajevo. You’ve been coming to the festival for many years, what is it that links you and Sarajevo?
I don’t really know what it is, but I think I’ve had it from the first time I was here. There’s something very familiar about this city. It’s not a political or intellectual connection — at least not consciously — it’s more an emotional one. I identify with the city, with the festival and with the people. I get invited every year and I’ve been the president of the jury, I’ve screened my films there, I’ve done a couple of master classes. I think I’ve been there once without any reason at all. It’s become like a family thing. Maybe the political story of the place has added something to the people and the festival, that they have a certain identification with a number of causes connected to films, but there is just something humane and nice about Sarajevo.
You are getting a career achievement award and I want to talk about your career, but the issue of Gaza looms large so I’d thought we should address it immediately. As a Palestinian, and a Palestinian filmmaker, what has changed for you since October 7 and since the start of the war in Gaza?
That is an interesting question because nothing’s changed. I was beginning on a new project, starting to jot down ideas, seeing which would linger, but when [Oct. 7] happened, everything stopped. I make very few films, with years in between, and I make them out of mostly personal experiences, so I need to experience a certain ambiance, and I need to sponge up the global ambiance. Since the start of the war, for the first months, I deserted the writing, because I found out that I don’t yet have anything to say. I just got back to it actually, even though the war is still going on. I don’t know why I’m calling it a war now: The genocide is going on and it’s getting worse. So I’ve started toying with ideas for my next film, started trying to put myself to work.
But I don’t think it’s really a question of being Palestinian. The fact that I’m Palestinian adds a certain layer of familiarity with the place, because I know people from all over Palestine. And being a Palestinian filmmaker puts you in a kind of an alienated position vis-à-vis the world, as you wonder about the horrors happening in Palestine and the governments that are supporting that horror. It makes you feel less hopeful about any possible change. But finally, it is about globalization — that there is power and money and multinationals with interests in militarization and fascism.
Israel is not the only place that is fascist, by the way. If you look around, half the countries in Europe are going that way. There is a right-wing, atmosphere that is truly frightening in Europe. In the States as well, of course. There are a lot of these people who support these kinds of regimes — this bloodthirsty, extreme conservatism, the extreme far-right, the Neo Nazis, are sprouting up everywhere. So [as a Palestinian] it puts you in a strange place. In order to keep going, you need to have a little hope and know that things can change. But of course, you start to wonder sometimes if it’s really hope or the illusion of hope.
I went back to reading [Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor] Primo Levi, who I used to be absolutely attached to for so long. I used to carry his books with me on my travels. When [Oct. 7] happened, I went back to his writings to see how people felt back then. If you [were] living, say, as a Jew in France at the time, you [were] basically worried about your neighbor turning you into the police. If you think about how people used to live in that moment, the ambiance is so horrifying. It makes you wonder about how people survived such extremities. And that makes me think people in Gaza now, with their daily routines of receiving one-ton bombs on top of their heads, and having their children buried under the ground. It is a weird, strange moment, in the history of humanity.
Have you seen a different reaction to you personally, as a Palestinian artist since Oct. 7?
Personally, no. I have witnessed other people being censored, galleries closing, artists being exiled and not allowed to work, people being fired. But, like you, I just read all of this stuff. I knew quite a few people who went to Berlin because it was supposedly such a free city, and really got trapped, because its suddenly wasn’t a free city, and found themselves controlled and interrogated. But personally, no, I haven’t experienced anything. Let’s wait until I have a script ready for my next film and see the reaction to that before we say if things have changed.
It Must Be Heaven
Le Pacte
All your films deal with darkness in the world but they usually end on a moment of hope. I have to think of the final dancing scene in the gay club in It Must Be Heaven. Do you see any hope in the situation for Palestinians in Gaza at the moment?
Again, it’s not only Palestinians, but I think we are living in a world where you see more and more younger people who are, less or even non-nationalistic. They are activists, and they want to live without having any ideologies stuck on them. They want to be free and they have their own definitions of how they can be so. In France, you have a lot of young people who are really fantastic, doing activism that is not just militant, it’s culture. Just like that last scene in It Must Be Heaven. You have similar people everywhere in the world. It’s very touching to see because they are trying to find ways to express themselves freely, even if, in certain countries, it has to be done cautiously, because Big Brother is always watching. That bar I filmed at is a real Palestinian gay and lesbian bar and those are the actual people who go to these kinds of bars — they weren’t extras I brought in. After filming, quite a few of them ended up in hospital with injuries caused by the Israeli police. It’s not easy to arrest people just for expressing joy, for dancing, for poetry, for jamming on guitars in the bars, for not doing anything against the law. But they pose a threat to the system, because they are free, willing people, and that is a menace to the system. That happens everywhere in the world. The second you have any kind of art or culture or poetry, it becomes suspicious for the ruling authorities.
Elia Suleiman at the 2022 European Film Awards
Photo by Sophia Groves/Getty Images
It’s just that art marches a lot slower than bullets. So change maybe won’t come right away, maybe not in our lifetime, but that accumulation of the production of culture, of freer people, might eventually have a result. I’m saying this because if you look at the past 200 years, let’s say we came from a place where there was slavery and things have shifted. There are still some forms of slavery around the world, but it’s no longer seen as legitimate for colonial powers to just go to Africa and ship 20 million people across the ocean, throwing quite a few of them into the sea. There were and are other horrors, from the First and Second World War, there are still a lot of humans damaging other humans’ lives. But the fact is, things do change. Maybe through this slow accumulation of art and freedom, we may find a way ahead to a better world. I think the production of art is important for the production of hope.
Is that your goal in making movies, the production of hope?
I think the minimum that I can do is to produce pleasure. Through cinema, to make moments of pleasure, that the spectators can share, and to give a sense of consolation that some of us are still there not looking to do evil. It’s about producing tenderness, which actually can produce that kind of hope. I think when people have pleasure in their lives, they get less anxious and maybe less violent towards themselves and others. I see a couple leaving a film of mine feeling hungry, that’s gratifying because that means they are going to enjoy their dinner. The point is not that they talk or don’t talk about the film. The point is the feeling or emotion they take out of the cinema that seeps through their different senses, and they want to extend that pleasure. I know that this is not solving the Palestinian issue, but I always have a feeling that it does add something.
You have all these movements, from the LGBT or African American movement in the States, that are saying the same thing: ‘We want to be free.’ They identify with Gaza, but they also want to better their own lives. So you can see that Gaza can become a catalyst for change in a lot of parts in the world, as people identify injustices there, they also see the injustices where they live and what they witness. It’s more complex than that, of course, but I think when you see injustice in one place, you start to connect it to injustice in your everyday life.
Divine Intervention
Pyramide Distribution
Humor has always been at the core of your films. People compare you to Jacques Tati or Buster Keaton, but you say they weren’t your inspiration. Where does your humor come from? Is it from your family?
Exactly! You nailed it. It comes from my family. I’m the youngest of five, and my parents were quite tender and funny and humorous. There was always laughter in the house. A lot of the stuff you see in my films, I nicked for my brothers. They would come to me and say: “I have a story for you. It’s got to be in the film” and I’d write it down and say, give me more. Growing up in a small town that gradually became a ghetto [Nazareth] produced the kinds of characters that I put in my film, who might despair, but they are also funny. Because in every ghetto there is despair and there’s humor.
Do you see humor as a form of political resistance?
Yes, but it isn’t just humor, it isn’t just my films. I think art is a form of resistance. Conducting your daily life can be a form of resistance. Being ecologically aware can be a form of resistance. Poetry is a form of resistance. Making life beautiful is a form of resistance. My films are just the way I see things. When I’m sitting in a cafe and see something that has potential, cinematic potential, I write it down. It’s just a sensation then it has to be developed, but there’s always [something] from daily life which is the point of departure into the cinematic world. It is a form of resistance, but it’s not a strategy. It’s what tickles me from within, and then I toy with it to make sure the humor is complex and layered, with social and political dimensions. That takes a long time in solitude to imagine, and to imagine how others will see it. Because you don’t make films for yourself, you make films to share. I want to make sure the people in Norway or Iceland can also watch these same moments and have their own connectedness with them. I don’t give history lessons, I don’t care for history lessons. Maybe my films can get people intrigued to go and learn more but that’s not what’s in the films themselves. But when it comes to humor, yes, it is essential. Looking at this cruel world we live in, if I didn’t have the humor, I think I would die.
It also seems to me it would be impossible to compete with the real horror, with the violent images, we see on TV and social media.
Yes. I don’t use violence in my films or only very rarely. Maybe one moment here, one moment there. I’ve turned my back on these horrific, polluting images that the television produces for the news. I have no social media whatsoever. I don’t want to live in that world. It’s too noisy for me. That’s the one thing that gets me anxious: The noise of the world. One has to really protect oneself. If we’re talking about resistance, if you want to create more art and more pleasure, about the need for tenderness or connectedness, you need to turn your back on the noise.
