It Must Be Heaven, a 2019 movie by Palestinian film-maker Elia Suleiman, is an impressive meld of the beautiful, the funny, and the disturbing.

Suleiman plays himself, travelling from Nazareth to Paris and then New York, to appear on various panels, and try to get backing for his film. The only words he says throughout are "Nazareth" and "I am Palestinian". Otherwise, he observes. His benevolent, bespectacled, slightly bemused face is usually topped off with a hat.

Things are not all rosy at home (there's the lemon-stealer; the guy with the rambling, crazy story; the gang of youths armed with baseball bats, who nevertheless gallop straight past him; the thugs at the local bar whose complaints seem to score them disproportionate amounts of free alcohol; the blindfolded girl in the back of the police car, the officers in charge of which are busy swapping sunglasses).

But once he gets to other places, it's clear not all is well there either.

We watch balletic teams of Parisian cops patrolling on hoverboards, and a column of tanks trundling past the Banque de France on Bastille Day; an ambulance crew offering a homeless man what seems like an airline-style meal, while leaving him still on the street; a tattooed guy exuding menace on the metro (maybe this is unfair on tattooed people...). Later we watch Americans shopping in supermarkets, all kinds of firearms dangling from their shoulders. We see American cops chasing a woman painted with the Palestinian flag.

As Lee Marshall puts it: "We all now live in a kind of global Palestine, where arbitrary displays of power, threats of violence, and lost people in search of meaning and identity are the new normal."

Of course, in light of the recent bout of horrible violence (the difficulties of reporting which are cogently presented here), this might seem a little exaggerated. But Charles Bramesco is essentially right when he comments that however far the benign figure of Suleiman travels, "he’s never that far from where he started. Hostility, senselessness, and discord appear wherever someone knows enough to notice them."

The movie also makes clear that no-one really gets Palestinians... In Paris his movie pitch is rejected because the product he is proposing is "not Palestinian enough". It could take place anywhere, he is told, "even here". Yes, quite... In the US he gets even shorter shrift. A friend, introducing him to an American producer, is reduced to saying plaintively: "He's Palestinian... but he makes comedies!"

And that's true. It's a very funny film. When Suleiman attends a seminar in New York, there's a wonderful send-up of the rambling and pretentious academic question that we all know and hate. And the opening sequence has a bishop leading a solemn procession to a set of doors that ceremonial protocol requires should be opened, and the custodian behind them determines should remain closed. You can read all sorts of things into that denial of entry, I'm sure, but it's also laugh-out-loud funny as the bishop goes behind the scenes to sort out the obstreperous door-opener with somewhat unbishoply tactics.

We close in a nightclub, with young people raising their arms, dancing, talking, and laughing, pretty much as they would in so many other places. I guess that's kind of positive...


My pictures in this post are of places that make me think of heaven (even though there's often a fair amount of hell involved too). Here we have Tibet









Kay Pollak's movie As It Is in Heaven, released  in 2004, made me cry...

Daniel Dareus, a renowned musician -- composer, violinist, conductor -- suffers a health breakdown, and returns to the Swedish village of his childhood. You wonder why, as this is the village his mother (no dad is in sight) took him away from when he was seven, after he was subject to bullying. But anyway...

He says he has come to listen.

He takes on the role of cantor at the local church, which involves coaching the choir. In the course of their sessions, this mixed bag of parishioners have a lot of fun (so much so that choir membership augments rapidly), and in the process learn lots, not only about music but also about themselves.

But at the same time they are forced to confront some secrets, and to learn to express to each other some truths that have long lain buried or unacknowledged. Encouraged by open-spirited shop assistant Lena and frustrated clergy wife Inger, the group progressively learns to incorporate the special needs lad who has previously lurked around the edges of the community, curb the domestic abuser who has made Gabriella's life hell, and provide an environment in which small acts of courage can thrive: the rambunctious but thoughtless Arne, who has been doing his own bit of bullying without even realizing it, is confronted by his victim, for example; and a decades-old secret love is declared.

Eventually, a somewhat debatable relationship comes into being between Daniel and Lena (she is really a LOT younger than him...). But it is never destined to last long, as both seem to know that Daniel's health will never entirely recover.

I don't know where the film-maker sits theologically, but the message the movie conveys is spot on, as far as I'm concerned. Whereas the vicar is all for conservatism and exclusion, and defines "sin" in terms of individual lapses that are -- depending on the perpetrator -- kept shamefully secret or mercilessly outed, the musician unknowingly promotes inclusivity, community, and empowerment.

Find your own distinctive individual "tone", urges Daniel, and then when you all sing your individual tone together, the result will be beautiful.

I don't know if that really works, musically speaking, but in the film it makes for a beautiful sound -- a kind of multi-layered hum, formless and swirling, but quintessentially human, and deeply stirring.

At the end, when Daniel is dying, alone, in a public toilet in the Austrian town where the choir have gone to take part in a competition, his singers, at a loss on stage because their leader is mysteriously missing, strike up their hum as a means of regaining their calm. On the internal communication system, Daniel is able to hear how beautifully they do this, and how the audience (made up of other choirs who don't really know what's happening) spontaneously respond to this visceral and plaintive human call by sending their own tones out into the void to join them.

That is heaven, it seems to me. Not just some state in the future -- although it is that, too, I'm sure, in some shape or form -- but also a state we can produce on earth when we reach out from the depth of our souls to touch the depth of the souls around us.

Fun fact: By the end of 2010, this movie had played in the same Sydney cinema for two whole years. I think I understand why.


The Isle of Man, my first heavenly home









The 2018 movie Cyrano, My Love (the French title is Edmond) was directed by Alexis Michalik, who based it on his hugely successful stage play. It's about Edmond Rostand, and how he wrote his famous 1897 piece, Cyrano de Bergerac, which became one of the most enduring French dramas of all time. It's a thoroughly entertaining farce, complete with mistaken identities, volatile actors, and dodgy trapdoors.

But let's backtrack a little to see the heaven connection...

In the edition of The Other World or The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon made available for free by Gutenberg, there's a probably authentic portrait of the author, Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-55), painted by Zacharie Heince (1611-69). Underneath is a little set of rhymes that can be translated into prose like this:

The earth was bothering me too much,
So I took my flight to the heavens.
There I saw the sun and the moon,
And now I see the gods there too.

Cyrano -- famous as a soldier, duellist, writer, philosopher, and yes, owner of a large nose -- was also, less famously, a pioneer of science fiction. The narrator of The Other World describes a journey to the moon (propelled by means of a kind of rocket), and a meeting with a very different civilization, with different bodies, customs, and technology.

We don't know a massive amount about the real Cyrano. He was born in Paris and died there. He spent little if any time in Bergerac, and the circumstances surrounding his death are uncertain.

The nose, though undeniably large, probably did not drive his life in the way that entered public consciousness firstly via Theophile Gautier in his 1844 account, and then via Rostand's play.

Cyrano de Bergerac was written in nine months (not the three weeks depicted in the movie). And Rostand did not form with actor Leo and muse Jeanne the kind of triangle that would mirror the one in the play (Cyrano-Christian-Roxane). Jeanne is not a historical figure. But Rostand did once successfully coach an uninspired young man desirous of wooing a witty woman, so that bit's accurate... Given that Jeanne is an invention, it's also not surprising that there was no threat to Rostand's marriage of the type depicted in the movie (the playwright's actual wife, Rosemonde, was quite a literary personage in her own right). And, not too surprisingly, inspirational black cafe owner Honore is an invention that was apparently (and somewhat bewilderingly) inspired by the Western genre.

What is absolutely true, however, is that the roaring success of the play was totally unpredictable. On the evening of the dress rehearsal, Rostand, according to Rosemonde's account, apologizes to Constant Coquelin, the lead actor who had commissioned the work, for having "dragged him into this disastrous adventure". Rostand has previously suffered some "ovens" (the French word for oven, which is "four", is used to describe a theatrical flop, I learned, because if you don't turn the lights on in a theatre, it's as black as it is in an oven, and the reason you don't turn the lights is that no-one is there...). The movie ends, however, with a montage of the multiplicity of film versions that have been made of Rostand's tale (Nigel recalled, though I had forgotten, seeing the Gerard Depardieu version in Dorchester back in the early 1990s...)

And another thing that's absolutely true is that the audience on the real opening night gave the play a two-hour standing ovation.

Although it looks terribly Parisian, actually most of it was shot in the Czech Republic. The exception is the final scene of Cyrano the play, which was shot in the cloisters of the Saint-Pierre de Moissac abbey, in Tarn-et-Garonne.


Sarawak, our bit of heaven for the moment









I'll finish with a wonderful quote from Richard Rohr:

"It’s Heaven all the way to Heaven and it’s Hell all the way to Hell. We are in Heaven now by falling, by letting go, and by trusting and surrendering to this deeper, broader, and better reality that is already available to us. We’re in Hell now by wrapping ourselves around our hurts, by over-identifying with and attaching ourselves to our fears, so much so that they become our very identity."