Hello, my name is Justin McLew and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club. And today we are talking about writer, director, actor, Elia Suleiman.

What does a national cinema look like, Justin, when there is officially no nation?

That is one of the many questions raised by the work of this filmmaker, the most famous

Palestinian filmmaker active today.

Now, you say all that, and people may go, all right, I have to, you know, get myself ready

to watch this body of work

that will clearly be difficult and, you know, and depressing. Now, these movies are very funny.

Yes. Elia Suleiman is the most famous Palestinian filmmaker. And, I mean, I listen, folks,

I wish I could say that I knew him before the current conflict in Gaza.

I did not.

I found him, I mentioned last week, on the hit podcast, Michael and Us.

We wanted to do an episode on a Palestinian filmmaker.

We were looking at, you know, lists of famous Palestinian films, and all of them had titles like The Fence, you know.

Yeah.

And they're probably good?

They're probably very good.

And of course, of course they're all about that.

And we thought, wouldn't it be nice to do one that wasn't just that?

Yeah.

Did you want to do like, yeah, what is a popular cinema from Palestine, which is very difficult?

I'm actually, yeah, and I'm not sure I still know.

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