Scene from Paradise Now, nominated for an Oscar and winner of the 2006 Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film (Paradise Now/Warner Brothers)

Interview with Hany Abu Assad, "Paradise Now"
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, October 2005

On Friday, October 28, the new Palestinian drama “Paradise Now” will open in New York City and will then be released in select cities. This film was directed by Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu Assad, who is known for his previous international award winning films “Rana’s Wedding” and “Ford Transit.”

In “Paradise Now,” Abu-Assad takes a more daring step in the history of Palestinian cinematography. The story of the film takes us inside the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, and follows two Palestinian young men as they prepare to carry out an attack inside Israel. The film was entirely filmed in the Palestinian territories and Israel.

The film has already caught the attention of many International Film Festivals such as the New York, Toronto, Berlin, and the Telluride 2005 Film Festivals and has already won the Blue Angel Award 2005 for Best European Film and the Amnesty International Award 2005. Palestine will be submitting the movie to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as its official entry for best foreign language film. The film will be distributed in the United States by Warner Brothers Studios....On October 19, ADC attended a private advance screening of the film. The following is ADC’s interview with director Hany Abu Assad about his movie.

You are an engineer by training, how did you become an international award winning filmmaker?

Just by luck I have become an international award winning filmmaker. I studied airplane engineering in Holland and I worked as process engineer for 2 years.

Did you anticipate that a major U.S. Studio, Warner Brothers, would pick up the movie? Did you anticipate receiving any awards for this film?

No, I was very surprised. But now looking back, it is not a surprise because in the United States there are enough people who are open minded and are curious like me.

Explain what, if any, obstacles you faced when making and financing the film.

I do not know about obstacles in financing the film but I know that we went through hell in order to make the shooting of the film possible. Shooting a film in occupied territories is not an easy thing. more..

Israel's Walter Cronkite Finds Himself at a Crossroads
By Gal Beckerman, Forward, December 23, 2005

...This summer, in a five-part series called "Land of the Settlers," that was shown on Israeli television, Chaim Yavin [returned from the West Bank and Gaza with] two testimonial threads: on the one hand, the humiliation and despair of Palestinians under occupation, and on the other hand, Jewish settlers who come off, in the words of Ha'aretz's Tom Segev, as "members of a fanatic, insane, racist, despicable, violent and dangerous sect — more infuriating and despairing than they have ever been seen in an Israeli film."....The first two parts of "Land of the Settlers" have now been translated into English and are making the rounds of American synagogues, giving some American audiences a chance to see the affecting documentary.

Hebron settler with Israeli soldiers (Reuters)

But the strongest presence in the film — more than the Palestinians on line at the checkpoints or the settlers shooting machine guns at Arab farmers — is Yavin's own voiceover, sincerely shocked, saddened and stupefied by what appears on the other end of his camera. There is not much new information here in this documentary, not for those of us who have been intellectually honest in exploring all the thorniness of the conflict. What is new is Yavin, like Columbus discovering his own backyard, suddenly coming to terms with all the moral and practical implications of the occupation as if he had never thought of them before, as if he hadn't been delivering the news every night for 40 years. The beauty is that he makes it new for us, as well

The first two parts of "Land of the Settlers" have now been translated into English and are making the rounds of American synagogues, giving some American audiences a chance to see the affecting documentary. In one scene, Yavin sits drinking tea in a settler bungalow. He engages the settlers in argument, screaming at them like a teenager would at an old conservative uncle at a family gathering, and eventually explodes against their stubbornness: "I am coming now from the roadblock. I am coming from a woman who had to give birth at a roadblock because they didn't let her go through, and I say to you, 'This isn't Jewish, what we're doing here.'" more..