From Die Jüdische, with thanks to Teri:
Hany Abu – Assad`s movie “žParadise Now” is portraying two Palestinian suicide bombers.
At the end the screen goes blank. You do not see rubble nor dead people. The last thing you see is a pair of determined staring eyes. The camera moves closer to the face of the young Palestinian and separates him from the world surrounding him: his victims.
The eyes in the face belong to a man called Said. For 90 minutes the audience accompanied him through the movie “Paradise Now”. Said is a suicide bomber and his victims are Israeli Jews.
“Paradise Now” is not one of those movies, shot by well educated moviemakers, producers and technicians in the Palestinian territories, that celebrates “martyrs”: those men and women who are sacrificing themselves in order to kill as many Jews as they can.
“Paradise Now ” is in competition at the 55th International Film festival Berlinale which opened last Thursday in Berlin. The director Hany Abu-Assad is asked in the press conference for “Paradise Now”: “why are there almost only Israeli soldiers sitting in the bus, which Said is going to blow up? Assad answers evasively; he wanted to let the character decide for himself.
Kais Nashef, who plays Said in the movie, continues to answer: ” the soldiers in the bus made the decision, to blow himself up, easier [if]Israelis stay invisible throughout the movie; you can only see them from afar, only as figures and not as human beings. You are not allowed to get to know any of the other characters, neither the people at the bus station nor the little girl standing by the bus driver, otherwise the audience could emphasize with them.“