by SARAH ROWLAND

Saïd and Khaled spend most of their time drinking tea, puffing on a hookah and talking in circular logic. On the surface, they are your run-of-the-mill slackers: lazy, likeable and unlucky at love. But there is one difference between these two Palestinian best friends and, say, the average underemployed pothead: Saïd and Khaled are willing to blow themselves to smithereens for their country.

Putting this kind of a human face on suicide bombers is no easy feat, but that’s exactly what Arab filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad did with his latest film Paradise Now. However, the Netherlands-based filmmaker admits that making sure his portrayal of Palestinian terrorists was 100 per cent even-handed wasn’t necessarily a priority.

“Funnily enough, my first concern was how I would make it a good movie,” says Abu-Assad, who sat down with the Mirror at the Toronto film fest. “But slowly, slowly as I began my research, I discovered how the reality was much more shocking than I had imagined. And then I was also shocked at how little I knew about it—that I was just as ignorant and stupid about the situation as others.”

According to Abu-Assad, what struck him the most, however, was seeing the psychological effects that the Israeli occupation has had on his family members who still call the West Bank home.

“In general, people don’t like to be humiliated,” he says. “And for many Palestinians, there is no hope that their humiliation will ever end. They just have to swallow it every day. So when someone kills himself and damages the enemy at the same time, it’s a way of telling themselves that they’re not impotent.”

Though he says he can sympathize with the motives behind some acts of terrorism, Abu-Assad, who shot the film in Nazareth, Nablus and Tel Aviv, says that he would never strap several sticks of dynamite to his belly in the name of his people’s freedom.

“I don’t have to because I have the opportunity to express my weakness through filmmaking,” he says. “And I’m also lucky because I have a Dutch passport. I leave when I want to, so I’m not facing the humiliation every day, I’m just facing it once a year.”

Despite the dramatic gravity and political landmines that Paradise Now gets into, Abu-Assad manages to pepper some dryly delivered comedy without making any jarring changes in the film’s overall tone. For example, when Saïd (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) are leaving their videotaped testimonies, they keep screwing up their lines. After several takes, the camera crew start eating their lunch, while the heavily armed and seriously nervous would-be bombers try to re-jig their wording.

“For me, making fun of your misery is another way of accepting it,” says Abu-Assad. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t nervous when a group of onlookers gathered around the open set. “I was terrified,” he says. “I thought they would interfere with the scene and accuse us of making fun of it. But they didn’t. And I was like, ‘Wow, this scene must be realistic,’ because if truth be told, they were more concerned with how the actor was carrying the weapon than whether or not my jokes were appropriate.”

Paradise Now opens Friday, Nov. 18

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