The European Film Academy has awarded the prestigious European Achievement Award for World Cinema to film-maker Elia Suleiman for “his impressive dedication to cinema.” For 35 years the Academy has been organizing the European Film Awards to celebrate European film-making and Suleiman is the first Palestinian director to win the award.
Born in 1960 in Nazareth, Elia Suleiman is the son of a resistance fighter who fought against the fledgling State of Israel in 1948. At 17 he sought exile in London then, between 1981 and 1993, in New York. It was there he made his first short films and worked as a lecturer at various universities. In 1994 the European Commission asked him to create a Film and Media Department at the University of Birzeit, a Palestinian town near Ramallah. In 1996 he directed his first feature, Chronicle of a Disappearance, in which he told the story of his own family. The film won the Best Film Award at the Venice Film Festival. Since then, living in Paris, he has made several other dark comedies in which he invariably plays himself.
In his most recent film, It Must Be Heaven (2019), he retraces his own journey leaving Palestine to find a new home. The film is satirical, with each new country parodied in turn. Shown at Cannes, it won the Jury Special Mention as well as the Fipresci International Critics’ Award.
Elia Suleiman is artistic advisor to the Doha Film Institute and has received the Dutch Prince Claus Award as well as the Henri-Jeanson Award given in memory of one of French cinema’s greatest scriptwriters by the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers (SACD).
Sources: Cineuropa, BroadcastPro, Ciné Club de Caen
