Hany Abu-Assad

Hany Abu-Assad ( Arabic هاني أبو أسعد, DMG Hānī Abū Asʿad ; * October 11, 1961 in Nazareth ) is a Dutch - Palestinian film director , screenwriter and film producer .

biography

Training and first short films

Hany Abu-Assad was born in Nazareth in 1961. His family was wealthy, he grew up with five other siblings and went to a school attended by Muslims and Palestinian Christians , where he counted predominantly Palestinian Christians among his friends.

Abu-Assad, who as a child with American Westerns had grown up, emigrated in 1980 after finishing school in the Netherlands, where he worked in Haarlem an engineering degree began. During this time he tried unsuccessfully to join the PLO in Bonn . After completing his studies, Abu-Assad worked as an aircraft engineer in Amsterdam for two years before returning to his home country and turning to film and television through the acquaintance of the Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi . For example, he was responsible for television programs and documentaries such as Dar O Dour (1990) and Long Days in Gaza (1991) for the British television station Channel 4 and BBC , in which he dealt with everyday life in the Palestinian territories.

In 1990 Abu-Assad founded the film production company Ayloul Films, and two years later he made his debut as a director with the half-hour film Paper House , for which Abu-Assad also wrote the screenplay. In it he reports on the efforts of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy who is trying to rebuild the family home that was destroyed by the Israeli army. The 16mm short film , which was broadcast by the Dutch television broadcaster Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS), was recognized by film critics and won a number of festival awards.

After the success of Paper House , Hany Abu-Assad produced the 74-minute film curfew together with WDR and ARTE . The family drama by Rashid Masharawi takes place against the background of a ban on going out by the Israeli army in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and was released in North American cinemas under the English title Curfew . Curfew is considered the first Palestinian feature film and was awarded at the Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival and the Cairo International Film Festival in 1994 , as well as the UNESCO Film Prize in Cannes . After the ten-minute short film The 13th (1997), in the making of which Abu-Assad distinguished himself as a screenwriter, producer and film director, Abu-Assad's feature film debut followed in 1998 with The 14th Chicken . The relationship comedy about a wedding party in Amsterdam opened the Nederlands Film Festival in Utrecht in 1998 and won United International Pictures (UIP) as a distributor in the Netherlands .

Success with feature films

In 2000, Hany Abu-Assad returned to documentary film and directed the 55-minute Palestinian-Dutch co-production Nazareth 2000 . The documentary is a satirical look at the situation in the Middle East by two Palestinian gas station operators . In the same year Abu-Assad founded the film production company Augustus Film together with the Dutchman Bero Beyer in Amsterdam . The Dutch-Palestinian filmmaker was also supposed to write the screenplay for Ford Transit in 2002 together with Beyer . The 80-minute documentary, which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival , focuses on a Palestinian taxi driver named Rajai, who drives his passengers across the roadblocks of Ramallah to take them to Jerusalem. The portrayal of a Palestinian actor who embodies a rude Israeli soldier fueled discussions in the Netherlands about how objectively a documentary should be staged. The TV station VPRO took Ford Transit out of its programming due to the controversy, but the Jerusalem plant was awarded the In the Spirit of Freedom Prize. In the same year, Abu-Assad directed his second feature film Rana's Wedding with actress Clara Khoury in the title role. Like the previous documentaries, the drama is set in Jerusalem and describes the attempts of a 17-year-old Palestinian girl to find a candidate for marriage within a few hours and thus avoid the threatened deportation to Egypt . Rana's Wedding , which the American film critic Roger Ebert praised as "the complete visual image of the borders, the Palestinian settlements and the streets of Jerusalem" , won prizes at the international film festivals in Haifa , Marrakech and Montpellier, as well as at the International Mediterranean Film Festival in Cologne .

In 2004 , the shooting of Hany Abu-Assad's third feature film Paradise Now began in Nablus , West Bank . The autodidact had already developed the script five years earlier together with Bero Beyer on the basis of the Israeli transcripts of the interrogation of suicide bombers and conversations with the bereaved. The focus of the drama is on the two Palestinian auto mechanics Said and Khaled (played by Kais Nashef and Ali Suliman ), who are persuaded by an extremist group to commit suicide bombings in Tel Aviv . During their last hours together in Israel, the men begin to question their actions and finally only one of the two friends makes it through to fulfill the assignment. Paradise Now , which celebrated its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2005 , was the focus of the critics. The human rights organization Amnesty International praised the film, produced by Augustus Film, Arte and the Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen , among others, in a press release as “a little story about a big conflict - moral, but not moralizing, touching but not sentimental” and drew it at the Berlinale with a prize. Negative voices accused the filmmaker of transfiguring the assassins into "mythical heroes" and calling for a boycott of the film. Despite the controversial opinion, Paradise Now won the 2006 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film as the official Palestinian competition entry and was nominated for an Oscar in the same category as the first Palestinian feature film .

After the success of Paradise Now , which was released in 45 countries, including Israeli and Palestinian cinemas, Hany Abu-Assad received a contract in Hollywood that required him to direct two films. At the same time, Abu-Assad, who does not practice Islam , moved to Los Angeles after twenty years in the Netherlands , where he was to direct his first English-language film with the drama LA Cairo . But the tragic comedy about the Arab-American dream was never realized. The Hollywood production The Vanished by Focus Features, announced in 2008, in which Nicolas Cage was supposed to take on the role of a father whose American-Arab son disappears without a trace after a trip abroad, never came about either. Instead, Abu-Assad released the short film A Boy, a Wall and a Donkey in 2008 about three Palestinian boys who want to direct a film without a camera and use the cameras at the Israeli border fortifications. The production was next to other works by u. a. Marina Abramović , Idrissa Ouédraogo , Walter Salles , Abderrahmane Sissako , Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Jasmila Žbanić part of the episode film Stories on Human Rights .

The film The Courier followed in 2011 , Abu-Assad's first US production as a director. However, the action film with Jeffrey Dean Morgan , Mickey Rourke and Til Schweiger in the leading roles was denied a regular theatrical release. In the same year the episode film Do Not Forget Me - Istanbul was released, which had been made a year earlier as a project of Istanbul for the European Capital of Culture year . Abu-Assad contributed the short film Almost . This is about two Palestinian sisters who meet again in Istanbul after decades of separation.

Quotes

“A film is an artistic product. I want to slip into a character that I am not myself, I experience things with him that I have not experienced before. My motivation is curiosity. "
"I am a realist. If I stimulate thought, I'm already satisfied. "
“As a filmmaker, it's always about your own curiosity. You want to know more about certain phenomena, you can go to places where you have never been before. You want to get to know a new point of view. This broadens your horizons: you can then question or reinforce your own opinions. "

Filmography (selection)

Director

1991: To whom it may concern (documentary)
1992: Paper House (short film)
1996: Onverwachte Natuur (TV series)
1997: The 13th (short film)
1998: The 14th Chicken ( Het 14de kippetje )
1999: De Arabieren van 2001 (documentary)
2000: Het Spijkerkwartier (documentary film)
2000: Nazareth 2000 (documentary)
2002: Ford Transit (documentary)
2002: Rana's Wedding ( Al Quds Fi Yaum Akhr )
2005: Paradise Now
2008: Stories on Human Rights (Episode: A Boy, a Wall and a Donkey )
2011: The Courier
2011: Do Not Forget Me - Istanbul (Episode: Almost )
2012: The Courier
2013: Omar
2015: The Idol (biography of Mohammed Assaf )
2017: Between Two Lives (The Mountain Between Us)

Screenwriter

1996: Onverwachte Natuur (TV series)
1997: The 13th (short film)
1998: Het 14de kippetje
2002: Ford Transit (documentary)
2005: Paradise Now
2013: Omar

film producer

1990: Dar 0 Dour (documentary)
1991: Long Days in Gaza (documentary)
1994: curfew ( Hatta Ishaar Akhar )
1997: The 13th (short film)
2013: Omar

Awards

Berlin International Film Festival

2005 : Grand Prize of the European Film and Television Academy ("Blue Angel"), Audience Prize of the Readers' Jury of the "Berliner Zeitung" and Amnesty International Film Prize for Paradise Now

Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema