Revelation, Sumud, and the Ethics of the Gaze in Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven

In It Must Be Heaven (2019), Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman writes, directs, and stars as a version of himself, a character identified only by his initials, E.S., a reoccurring persona in all of his feature films. The film is structured as a circular journey from E.S.’s hometown of Nazareth to Paris and New York, and back again, as he seeks funding for a new film. E.S. takes us on a journey in which we view him as a quiet witness in the larger world, moving through a series of serendipitous encounters observing how the specific anxieties of his homeland are unexpectedly reflected back at him in universal, often absurd and whimsical ways. The film begins in Nazareth, with a nighttime Christian procession led by an Orthodox Bishop, who chants in Arabic as he leads a group of followers to a heavy cast-iron door in a ceremony celebrating the resurrection of Christ. The ritual, however, receives a sly subversion when the person on the other side refuses to open the “gate” on the first knock; the distinct sound of liquid pouring suggests the mysterious person is drinking the Eucharistic wine. He taunts the Bishop, who knocks again, laughing, “How about you take off and come back later…” The result is an auditory slapstick that culminates in the Bishop entering through a side door; a tussle is heard before the door is opened and the followers are let in. This one-off scene acts as an introduction to the present-day social reality of Nazareth and specifically its Arab Christian community, while also introducing Suleiman’s wryly subversive sense of humour from the outset.

In an interview on the eve of a major retrospective of his films, Suleiman was asked about his method of gazing in the French sense of “le regard” or “intersecting gazes.” That is, the intersection of his directorial gaze, that of Suleiman as the character E.S., and how we as spectators are made aware of the act of looking through E.S.’s unique way of observing the world. In response, the director detailed how gazing for him simply begins with the act of daydreaming, with no agenda in mind, but this act soon leads to a deeper internal voyage of seeing oneself and “your own position in the real world.” If one is “very alert” they begin to see the mundane as a potential site of performance whose choreography reveals profound socio-political implications.¹ Moreover, Suleiman summarises this process as a “form of resistance – not a strategy.”² While Suleiman gives us the “how” of his gaze, it is not simply a singular gaze, of the same political reality repeated over and over, but arguably a sustained political and ethical strategy comprised of a dialectic of interwoven gazes; both revelatory and ethical, with each producing a distinct form of quiet resistance.

Recent attempts to categorise Palestinian cinema are complicated by a dissonant spatial paradox, in which colonisation is ongoing and the desire for post coloniality remains unrealised. Filmmakers themselves live in a “transnational atonality,” observing Palestinian “elsewheres” from their own physical “elsewheres.”³ The ‘atonal’ framework describes how contrasting, discordant sounds and images generate discourse: its political power lies in deliberate disconnection from totalising colonial or nationalist narratives, making space instead for fractured, lived experiences and aspirations.⁴  This ‘atonal’ condition is also deeply autobiographical for Suleiman. Born in Nazareth in 1960, he left Palestine in the early 1980s, finding New York a fermentative base for creation before returning intermittently to Palestine to make films. His films emerge from this continuous experience of displacement and uprootedness, which Suleiman himself articulated in his short film The Arab Dream (1998): “I don’t have a homeland to say I live in exile…I live in post-mortem…daily life, daily death.”⁵ The idea of living beyond exile, in a condition of perpetual statelessness, resonates directly with the ‘elsewhere’ logic of It Must Be Heaven, where Suleiman employs allegory and humour as a means of surviving the psychological toll of perpetual absence of home. 

What is revelatory about Suleiman’s method of observation, and gaze, is his ability to create a potent mismatch of playful humour and latent violence, establishing symmetries of experience from one place to the next. As E.S. walks in a long shot down a solitary street, the sound of running footsteps is heard before the source appears from somewhere far back, just as the camera cuts to a medium shot of E.S. turning. A group of armed youths holding guns and bats freeze when E.S. turns, as if in expectation that something violent is about to happen. This playful yet tense game continues with E.S. continuing to walk and turning to gauge the threat.  Yet when the sound of running steps is loudest, E.S. turns and the gang pass him by like he is a stump caught in the flow of a river. At that moment, a police siren can be heard off screen as the next shot reveals the gang frantically dispersing in different directions to comedic effect. For Suleiman, what’s in the frame is not fixed and “what you see is not the whole and the world is outside of that,” outside of the frame. In this sense, when a character leaves a frame, they are going “elsewhere.”⁶ By that logic, when the people and things he observes enter the fixed frame, they have also come from elsewhere and other more complex realities. 

The Nazareth scene finds its symmetrical and revelatory counterpart in Paris. When E.S. enters the subway, a thug butts up behind him to sneak in through the gate without paying. E.S. is comically pushed through the gate, left standing as the thug nonchalantly disappears into the subway. We soon forget about the thug as E.S. waits alone on the platform, observing a homeless woman on the other side tread slowly into the fixed frame. With a world-weary exhaustion, she pulls her possessions along as a group of police officers follow behind. Then the whole procession reverses direction to exit from where they entered. When E.S enters the subway car he turns to find the thug suddenly standing across from him, slurping from a can.  The camera cuts back to E.S. as his eyebrows raise in surprise. What follows is a dance of stares on E.S.’s part, averting and finding the thug’s relentless fixed stare back, culminating in an agonising moment where the train stops and the thug gets off, continuing to slurp from his can then squashing it performatively and dropping it into the garbage. He then walks slowly back to the open door of the train as a sound signals its imminent closing. E.S.’s subtle yet uncomfortable aversion of his eyes in counterpoint to the relentless stare of the thug is not resolved, as the moment cuts abruptly to another scene. Here, as in Nazareth, the true threat is not just the immediate confrontation but the ever-present sense of being watched—by police, by the state, by the thug’s unblinking gaze. Suleiman’s compositional symmetry frames these two “elsewheres” of Paris and Nazareth to elevate the humour’s atonal discord. In both, E.S.’s deadpan response to the threat produces a powerful allegory for what Suleiman has termed the “Palestinisation of the world,” a global condition where the absurdity of power becomes a universal, shared experience.⁷

Suleiman’s revelatory gaze is then expanded from these intimate confrontations to more spectacular displays of public symmetries with an unsettling yet offbeat clunky sound and sight gag of tanks rolling through Paris on Bastille Day, caught between the space of two buildings as if they were a common urban wildlife sighting. Similarly, in a New York bodega, the danger of military-grade weapons held by everyone that E.S. encounters from the shop to the street is diffused by their clumsy size and weight and almost velcroed attachment to their bodies, making the abstractly terrifying weapons seem like absurd props. Together, these scenes – from the personal threats of Nazareth to Paris, to the absurdly public in Paris and New York – construct a world universally reconfigured by the logics of intimidation, security and fear in a post 9/11 world. Ultimately, the power of Suleiman’s revelatory gaze lies in its ability to illuminate these global systems of power and intimidation, revealing that the specific anxiety of the Palestinian reality is not unique, but a pervasive condition of modern life around the world. 

Suleiman’s style of comedy is frequently described as deadpan and “a droll, near-silent presence, bearing witness to the absurdities of the world around him”⁸ or as comparable in style to that of Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati, both silent comedians whose humour arises from a form of impassive observation.⁹ Yet such descriptions risk misinterpreting the complexity of his performance. He has refined a method of acting which has evolved from what he describes as a “more static, almost robotic physique [with] eyes completely expressionless” to, in It Must Be Heaven, a performance of “a little haiku-ish animation – a little gesture here and there.” He arrives at this subtlety by rehearsing in front of a mirror: “Before I start to act in these films, I usually stand at the mirror and I start to look at myself and see how […] this guy [is] going to look.”¹⁰ 

The practice of holding his facial expressions to the point of ‘almost’ – an almost smile, an almost wince or aversion, almost sorrow – creates the difference between a gag and an ethical gesture. This is not to say that Suleiman’s films are devoid of gags or moments of pure humour, which actually help carry the audience without overwhelming heaviness. But in other moments, Suleiman’s “haiku-ish” animation becomes a gesture that brings us to the edge of expression without tripping over into caricature. It is in these subtle performances where Suleiman’s ethical gaze, rooted in the Arabic concept of Sumud (steadfastness) comes through. Sumud first came into use in Palestinian political discourse in the 1960s and ’70s as a call to resist dispossession by remaining on the land.  Since then, Sumud has evolved into a continuum of practices.¹¹  One such practice is described by Raja Shehadeh, who writes of daily endurance under occupation, giving an account where he listens silently to a catalogue of humiliations his cousin faced while traveling to visit him. Shehadeh quietly holds back his own anxieties as a way of offering quiet witness to such traumatic accounts, through the act of listening and presence, and a refusal to collapse.¹²

The ethical gaze operates in It Must be Heaven much like the practice of Sumud, as quiet moments of observation. In one such scene, E.S. walks home one night by way of a familiar alley we have seen in the day. As the sound of rain falling with the low rumble of thunder in the darkness echoes in the alley – sounding heavier than it looks – E.S. encounters his elderly neighbour who shakily supports himself, turned facing a wall. When E.S. approaches the man, he pauses in a moment of soft recognition and then comes closer. The elderly man turns, seemingly unaware of his own circumstances, only to complain “Neighbour…I never pissed so much in my life. I cannot stop.” As the thunder rumbles around them, they look up as if the predicament can be explained in some other metaphysical register. E.S. takes his neighbour by the arm, saying nothing, and gently walks him home holding the umbrella to shield him from the rain. This scene is in effect a quiet demonstration of Sumud – a small act of care and compassion that asserts a resilient human presence in the face of the world’s absurdities, and an allegory for resistance against its oppressive systems.

It Must Be Heaven (2019 France/Germany/Canada/Qatar/Palestine/Turkey 97 mins)

Prod Co: Rectangle Productions, Pallas Film, Nazira Films, Possibles Media, Zeynofilm Prod: Édouard Weil, Laurine Pelassy, Elia Suleiman, Zeynep Özbatur Atakan, Martin Hampel, Thanassis Karathanos, Michel Merkt, Serge Noël Dir, Scr: Elia Suleiman Phot: Sofian El Fani Ed: Véronique Lange Art Dir: Caroline Alder, Juna Suleiman Cos Des: Alexia Crisp-Jones, Eric Poirier

Cast: Elia Suleiman, Ali Suliman, François Girard, Gael García Bernal, Nancy Grant, Guy Sprung, Kwasi Songui, Stephen McHattie, Raïa Haïdar, Alain Dahan, Vincent Maraval, Grégoire Colin

Endnotes