Palestinian Narratives Enter the Mainstream

By Jordan Elgrably, AlterNet. Posted March 4, 2006.


Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad says his Oscar-nominated film, 'Paradise Now,' is an attempt to create peace between the Middle East's many identities.
Hany Abu-Assad's "Paradise Now," which won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, has been nominated in the same category for an Oscar, marking the first time the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has recognized a film from Palestine about Palestinian culture. (Several Israeli and Jewish groups have petitioned the academy to change the entry from "Palestine" to "Palestinian territories" to no avail as of this writing.)

With the recognition of "Paradise Now," a gripping tale of two young would-be suicide bombers from the impoverished town of Nablus, the entertainment industry has acknowledged that there is not just one narrative; that the Israeli-Jewish story must make room, finally, for Palestinian stories about themselves. And a just-published translation of the novel "Gate of the Sun" (Archipelago Books, 2006), by Elias Khoury, offers another opportunity to learn about how Palestinians see themselves as a people in exile, and how they view what happened to their country in 1948.

But questions of identity and identification are rarely without complexity, and the Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad is the first to recognize this. A former aerospace engineer who lived in Holland for 25 years, Abu-Assad began making films in the '90s, first coming to attention with the documentary "Nazareth 2000" and the feature film "Rana's Wedding" (2002), which described a day in the life of a young woman in Jerusalem trying to get married before 4 p.m.

A native of Nazareth, a predominantly poor Christian town in Israel, Abu-Assad, is a Muslim from a wealthy family who carries an Israeli passport. Palestinian Arabs --both Muslim and Christian -- number about one million in Israel and received Israeli citizenship in 1966.

Abu-Assad views his Israeli passport as just a "ticket to cross borders."

"I have an Israeli passport, yes," he says, "but that doesn't make me an Israeli, because as long as Israel wants to be a Jewish state, and I'm not Jewish, I can't be an Israeli."


complete article here:https://www.alternet.org/movies/33071/