International Film Festival of Ottawa

It Must Be Heaven (with Highway to Heaven)

Expired March 15, 2021 7:00 AM
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It Must Be Heaven (Feature Film): Filmmaker Elia Suleiman travels to different cities and finds unexpected parallels to his homeland of Palestine.


Highway to Heaven (Short Film): A beautifully composed and evocative documentary on the 25 houses of worship that line the No. 5 Road in Richmond, BC.


About the Pairing:

An inversion of It Must Be Heaven where a restless man is wandering westward in search of a new homeland, Highway to Heaven is an observational documentary exploring a single spot on Earth in which seemingly divergent religious ideologies co-exist in peaceful disassociation.


- Keltie Duncan

As distinctive a filmmaker as you will find in contemporary world cinema, Palestinian writer-actor-director Elia Suleiman brilliantly combines in his narratives of alienation and exile the comedy and pathos of Buster Keaton, the kinetic anarchy of Jacques Tati, and the ruminative power of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Expanding on a his loose trilogy of earlier films that investigated the fate of Palestine (1997’s Chronicle of A Disappearance, 2002’s Divine Intervention, and 2009’s The Time That Remains), his new globetrotting narrative cleverly blurs the lines between fiction and documentary, between Beckettian comedy and brave political investigation.


In It Must Be Heaven, a Palestinian filmmaker named ES (played by Suleiman himself) leaves Palestine to try to find a new homeland. His travels take him to Paris and then to New York. Ever observant, ES finds strange parallels with his original home, discovering odd human behaviours, eccentricities, and incidents not unlike those found there. Along the way, he’s also trying to raise money to make a new film about what is a decidedly offbeat (meta)physical journey.


Episodic and absurdist, Suleiman’s latest incisive, amusing road movie takes on the perils, pratfalls, and possibilities of a now global search for identity. It was awarded a Jury Special Mention at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.


- Tom McSorley

  • Year
    2019
  • Runtime
    97 minutes
  • Language
    English, French, Arabic
  • Country
    Palestine, France, Qatar, Germany, Canada, Turkey
  • Director
    Elia Suleiman
  • Screenwriter
    Elia Suleiman
  • Producer
    Martin Hampel, Thanassis Karathanos, Michel Merkt, Serge Noël, Zeynep Ozbatur Atakan, Laurine Pelassy, Elia Suleiman, Edouard Weil
  • Executive Producer
    Hanaa Issa
  • Co-Producer
    Georges Schoucair
  • Cast
    Elia Suleiman, Tarik Kopty, Kareem Ghneim
  • Cinematographer
    Sofian El Fani
  • Editor
    Véronique Lange