For my midterm in Professor A. George Bajalia’s class The Idea of Palestine, we were tasked with analyzing a work that dealt with the Palestine question and its circulation amidst different circles. I chose to analyze Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman’s film It Must Be Heaven about a film director pitching his movie about Palestine to different producers around the world, from Paris to New York, and how the film, which in and of itself showcases different geographies and social spheres could be interpreted by different audiences around which the film may circulate. It was a fruitful challenge to build upon my film essaying in classes like History of Spanish Cinema and International Art Cinema in an anthropological context, having to blend film analysis with critical analysis of ideas we’d learned in this class.
