Elia Suleiman: ‘It doesn’t make me feel good to feel corrupted’

The director, who is serving on the jury at the Venice Film Festival, has revealed that his long-awaited next film is in the works.

Elia Suleiman. Lionel Cironneau / AP Photo

It has been a long wait but more than five years after the release of The Time That Remains, the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman has revealed that his next film is finally in the works.

“I’m actually working on a script that has been in the making for the past year or so,” he says.

“As with all my scripts, I do not know where the story is heading, nor do I want to know where it is heading. I just want to get there. So I keep going, sometimes with a lot of enthusiasm. At this very moment I’m excited about it, but you could ask me in a week and I’ll be ­disheartened.”

There is a good chance the script will be ready next year and then, he says, will come the arduous task of raising finance.

In the meantime, Suleiman, one of the Middle East’s most celebrated filmmakers, will sit on the jury of the 71st Venice Film Festival, which begins on Wednesday. The jury will be presided over by the film composer ­Alexandre Desplat.

"Venice was somehow where I was initiated," he says. "My first film, Chronicle of a Disappearance, won a prize there in 1996 and so the idea of returning to be on the jury seems like the natural progression of things."

Also on the jury is the Pulitzer prize-winning Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri and the British actor Tim Roth.

“I know Tim Roth because we were on the jury together in Cannes,” Suleiman says. “So I thought it was funny to know that we would be on the jury together.”

Suleiman has also been the Artistic Advisor of the Doha Film Institute (DFI) since May last year.

One of his jobs there is to help first and second-time filmmakers get on the filmmaking ladder by advising the grant-making bodies and the institute’s Qumra festival.

In January the DFI cancelled this year’s festival, which had been due to be held in March, but Suleiman says things are now looking brighter at the institute.

“The DFI is trying to shift entirely its focus from what used to be a festival that was like so many other festivals around the world to one based on a very moral, ethical and cinematic equation,” he says.

“And that is not very easy to have in today’s world. It’s not a material investment, it’s an investment in young filmmakers and there is no immediate payoff, so people have to be very patient.

“There is a good feeling about the situation now; it is a big challenge.”

As is almost unavoidable from a director with Suleiman’s reputation and track record, he knows several of the directors whom he will have to judge.

“You have to maintain an ethical position,” says the 54-year-old. “I have been on juries where I’ve witnessed people be in the service of their friends and that is really no good. It doesn’t make me feel good to feel corrupted.

“I have a few friends who have stopped talking to me after I’ve been on a jury where their films have played.”

The continuing military bombardment of Gaza by Israel is naturally taking up much of his thoughts at this time. As he discusses the crisis, there is an insight into why he always plays silent characters in his own films.

“I was thinking about how incompetent language becomes in the face of such horrors,” he says. “When you wake up every day and you see fathers and mothers carrying dead babies on television and you realise that these people have no refuge, being Palestinian, I start to have flashbacks to other people’s lives.”

Suleiman lives in Paris and struggles with the French president François Hollande’s sympathetic views on Israel.

“To think that because of the stance he has that he becomes a path-maker for genocide is still something that I have to chew over, because I look at this guy and he seems a nice guy – he has glasses, is not too tall and always has this sense of being humane,” he says.

The conflict has also made him understand the power of social media. He is not on Facebook or Twitter and says that for the first time, he feels a sense of detachment because of this. Information passed on to him by friends has highlighted that what’s being shared on the internet often has more basis in reality than the editorially led news that he sees on television at home in France.

It’s the type of conundrum that the silent character he plays in his films would shrug his shoulders at.