Paradise Postponed
Thursday 7 July 2005: A date memorable for all the wrong reasons. It was the opening day of the 25th Cambridge Film Festival, Britain’s best ‘micro-budget film festival’, but this was not to be the day’s defining event. Four bombs were detonated by suicide bombers in London in the morning rush-hour, and at the time of writing at least 55 people lost their lives. After a subdued opening the festival continued on its way but there was to be one more casualty, the UK premiere of Paradise Now.
Paradise Now is about two Palestinian Childhood friends who are recruited as Suicide Bombers. Directed by Hany Abu-Assad the film follows the men’s final 48 hours in the run up to their proposed strike. It had made waves at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival winning three awards – the Amnesty International Film Prize, the Berliner Morgenpost Readers’ Prize and the AGICOA Blue Angel Award. Warner Independent Pictures (WiP) had then acquired all rights in North America and the UK to the film. The 25th Cambridge Film Festival was the next step in bringing in an audience. It opened on Thursday 7 July 2005, a date memorable for all the wrong reasons.
After consultation with the local authorities and the police the festival sadly decided to cancel the screening of Paradise Now, replacing it with March of the Penguins (another WiP title) and a second surprise film. An utterly understandable decision as the shock and horror of the terrorist acts gradually sank in to a jittery nation. The festival’s credentials were not in doubt as the Palestinian film Thirst (director Tawfik Abu Wael) was screened amongst other more general politically minded films including King’s Game and The Last Mitterrand. Even Peter Watkins’ stark postcard from the past, Punishment Park was shown.
The issue is that the very film closest to some of the actual events of Thursday 7 July was instantly relegated to obscurity, rendered insensitive and self-censored. Paradise Now may now never receive a theatrical release. The effect of 9/11 on popular film was immeasurable, both immediately as blockbusters such as Spiderman underwent last minute re-editing and a host of other smaller films plummeted off the radar some never to be seen again. In a bid to capture the public mood the studios and distributors back-pedalled furiously green-lighting patriotic peons ‘right, right and centre of right’.
Roll forward a few years and the first films started to appear which had their development cycle post 9/11. Past the films that deified servicemen, works started to appear last year that suggested that things might not be all that one-sided or so patriotic. Films like Yasmin, which examined the reaction of a Yorkshire Muslim girl enduring the indignities heaped upon her post 9/11, or Hamburg Cell, which dispassionately chronicled the 9/11 suicide pilots. Yes, which screened at this year’s Cambridge Film Festival, should also be included here with its East meets West themes. Despite the false promise of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 a questioning voice emerged elsewhere. Last autumn BBC 2 screened Adam Curtis’ television documentary The Power of Nightmares which was subsequently re-cut theatrically for the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Dismissive of the modern ‘politics of fear’ Curtis’ documentary pitted the American Neo-Conservatives and the radical Islamists against each other, showing that we are all caught in the middle of this battle ensnared in the rhetoric of potential terrorist acts – the power of nightmares.
Unfortunately as last year’s Madrid bombings and the more recent London bombings have shown, there is something to be afraid of. The terrorists may never score a victory in the Western world again as symbolic as the World Trade Centre but packed commuter trains are sufficiently lethal. Yet repugnantly high as the casualty rates were these are slight compared to the continued bombing campaigns by insurgents in Iraq, a US excursion deep in the shadow of Vietnam.
Whilst agreeing wholeheartedly with the decision to cancel Paradise Now on this occasion, the question remains when should this film and others like it be shown?
