Elia Suleiman Quotes

Living more intensely, more lovingly, with more camaraderie, that is in itself resistance.

What cinema can do is the reordering of this reality from a certain chaos or from a certain order into an aesthetic dimension.

Someone like myself is not from one place. I am in total identification with the New York, French, and Palestine experience and do not stop at the borders of identity.

I'm trying to use Palestine as a microcosm of the world, but maybe the world is a microcosm of Palestine. We're living in a moment that has lost attachment to the ideology behind boundaries.

Silence can be intimidating, sometimes provocative, sometimes a form of resistance because it dislocates.

I try to use fiction in order to reduce the potentiality of something being true. We produce our own memories so I'm not sure of truth.

I don't think there should be a Palestinian state because I don't believe in states.

To think of a film from the point of view of a tank barrel is already so inhumanly positioned. This is when film can reveal itself scandalously.

The problem is that when you grow absolutely certain that all authorities are corrupt, then that would include the Palestinian authorities as well.

It's crucial to choose your work place - some places lend themselves to you and others don't.

It's a false illusion that we wake up thinking of who we are in terms of identity and that we are stuck in the boundaries of who we are nationalistically.

I am more at peace than I've ever known myself to be. My connectedness to the world is more intense. I am more attentive to the humanity around me.

I'm not in the business of saying just one thing about just one place. If you only see Palestine in my films, then I've failed because then I'm just a provincial filmmaker.

I don't particularly have a good memory. I think history is many times just the text written by the victors. I wanted to counter that aspect.

There are a lot of questions that come out of the silence. It is so close to the infinite.

I do not teach history in my films. I don't have a linear point of view or argument. What I do in my films is to live the human experience; human, whether in Nazareth or anywhere else in the world.

People in power tend to find poetry dangerous to them because it is dislocating, they can't catch it, can't control it. They prefer coherence, what's blunt and has clarity.