Photo By Steve Ramos

Paradise Now director Hany Abu-Assad says it's a filmmaker's job to turn reality into a document like poetry or literature.

The obstacles Palestine-born, Amsterdam-based filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad expected to face while filming his suicide bomber drama, Paradise Now, included patchwork financing, a short shooting schedule and limited technical resources -- the norm for many directors tackling serious fare.

Unique to the West Bank location of the film were police checkpoints, armed soldiers and the constant threat of missile strikes. The added dangers united Abu-Assad, his cast of professional actors and his crew with the day-to-day realities faced by the Palestinian and Israeli characters in the film.

When Abu-Assad's location manager was kidnapped and held for two hours before being released, the surrounding tension brought home the truth of West Bank politics. To borrow from Francis Ford Coppola's famous description of his Vietnam epic, Apocalypse Now, Paradise Now ceased being a film about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and became the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

News stories reveal dates, names and locations behind the warfare throughout the West Bank and Tel Aviv. Abu-Assad's hope for Paradise Now is to offer a deeper, more humanistic and perhaps balanced look at the horrific happenings. That is, he says while promoting his film at the Toronto International Film Festival, if people will give the daring film a chance.

"What is the message of your film?" an audience member asks Abu-Assad after a festival screening. The man's voice is clearly agitated, but Abu-Assad responds with a shrug and a slight smile.

"I leave messages for the postman," he replies.

In Paradise Now, two Palestinian young men, friends Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), leave their workday lives after being chosen by activist leaders to become human bombers. Their beards and curly dark hair are cut and shaven. They hold up assault rifles to pose for their martyr photos. Before leaving for Tel Aviv, their casual clothes are switched with a dark black suit and crisp white dress shirt.

Their journey unfolds throughout the narrow alleys of the West Bank town of Nablus and across the security border into Tel Aviv. Unexpected feelings of fear determine what happens next.

Abu-Assad had hoped that his journey with Paradise Now would be less volatile after the production, but the opposite proved true. Earlier in the year at the Berlin International Film Festival, protestors outside screenings held a banner reading "Stop Glorifying Suicide Killers." Despite the protests, Paradise Now was voted the best European film by the Berlin Festival jury.

After the summertime London bombings, programmers at Britain's Cambridge Film Festival pulled the film because of its suicide bomber characters.

For some people, the young male bombers of Paradise Now are freedom fighters and noble martyrs. To others, they're simply terrorists. Newspaper headlines cause many to watch Paradise Now with preconceived anger. All Abu-Assad wants to do is capture the grim lives facing many Palestinians and Israelis.

Abu-Assad was born in Nazareth in 1961 but left to study engineering in the Netherlands. He's a trained man of science, but he abandoned his stable career to tell stories about his native people, to be closer to the human condition. If he has one objective, it's to be fair about a topic that's divided the Middle East and the rest of the world.

"Politics is about mobilizing people and controlling them, and I don't want to control anybody," he says. "The only thing you do as a filmmaker is take reality and make it into a document like poetry or literature."

Abu-Assad's past features and documentaries include The Fourteenth Chick, Nazareth 2000, the pseudo-documentary Ford Transit and the acclaimed drama Rana's Wedding.

He admits he wanted to show the chain of command that leads Said and Khaled into their predicament. It's as if they've lost control of their own lives: They are lambs prepared for slaughter.

The film's core emotion is fear: How would it feel for a bomb to be strapped to your chest?

Abu-Assad claims a face heavy with the emotion of 1,000 lives. His dark hair is cropped close to his head. His eyes are heavy with feeling. When he smiles, it looks out of place on his face. Paradise Now is just one of many extraordinary stories in an extraordinary life.

Early in the film, Said and Khaled record martyr videos as part of their preparation, but the video cameras don't work and they have to prepare a second take. Abu-Assad filmed the scene in a building used by real suicide bombers, and the authenticity took a toll on his actors. They became nervous and scared, providing the realism Abu-Assad wanted. Real weapons were used for the film, simply because they're easy to get.

The director emphasizes that no crewmember, not even the kidnapped location manager, was harmed during filming. Still, the tension remained.

Asked if he would still make Paradise Now, he shakes his head.

"I've come to the conclusion that I would not do it again," he says. "We went too far with this situation. But there was no way out. We were captured in the situation of the movie."

Abu-Assad sits alone in a room at the InterContinental Hotel in Toronto. His schedule is less hectic than a starlet or celebrity leading man, but he's here alone to support and promote his film and answer questions from audiences divided by the subject matter.

What God only knows -- why people like Said and Khaled would do such a thing -- is intentionally left vague. Paradise Now is a human drama, not a news story. Emotions take priority.

"It is an honest movie," Abu-Assad says, before leaving for another screening. "This is the reason people cannot look against it. It is what it is. Whatever violent power tries to suppress you, the human being is able to find a way and to create optimism and hope. This is human, and the human always survives." ©