The European Film Academy honors Palestinian author Elia Suleiman for her European achievement in the World Film Award.
Paris-based Suleiman, whose latest work It Must Be Heaven premiered in 2019 in Cannes, is the first Palestinian director to win this prestigious award.
Solomon will be the guest of honor at the 35th European Film Awards to be held on December 10 in Reykjavik.
Born in Nazareth, Suleiman began his career in New York where, in the early 1990s, he filmed two short films, “Prelude to the End of an Argument” and “Homage to Assassination,” which won several awards.
Solomon’s first feature film, Chronicle of a Disappearance, about the loss of national identity among the Arab population of Israel, won first prize at the 1996 Venice Film Festival. In 2002, his film Divine Intervention won the Jury Prize and Fipresci Intl. Critics’ Award at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Best Foreign Film Award at the European Film Awards, which were held in Rome that year.
All of Suleiman’s works, in which he also stars, offer a personal perspective on the sad and surreal aspects of Palestinian life in which humor is essential to survival.
In 2007, he was selected as one of 35 directors for “To Each His Own Cinema”, a collective film to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. His subsequent feature film “The Time That Remains”, A Meditation on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, was in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. In 2012, he completed a short segment titled “Diary of a Newbie” for the group feature “7 Days in Havana”. The film was in the official selection for Un Certain Regard at Cannes.
In It Must Be Heaven, Suleiman’s vision is transformed into the struggle that Palestinians live outside their country with their identity.
Elia Suleiman is an art advisor at the Doha Film Institute. He has received numerous awards, including the Dutch Prince Claus Award as well as the Henry Jansson Award by the French Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD) which annually celebrates an author in memory of one of the greatest screenwriters in French cinema.
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