:There's a lot of people who compare your work to that of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. But, the first time when I saw your films, I was rather more reminded of certain Czech novels. Are there any influences that extract from literature when you conceive your sketches?

SULEIMAN: Yes. Influence, I don’t know… well, let me be more precise. Because—I don’t know if you’ve read that too—but I’m always saying the same thing over and over: I was never influenced by Buster Keaton, or by Jacques Tati.

: Exactly. Yet people still ask you about that.

SULEIMAN: Maybe they don't know that I've answered this before, but the fact is that I understand where they’re coming from. Because yes, there is a lot of resemblances, and I can see that and I ire that, it's flattering. However, I don't think that images come from images only. They come from your own images. They can come from, you know, reading a book that is not even image-oriented. But the fact that a sentence or a poetic moment, a poetic word, can start to instigate and inspire you visually—it's possible, it's feasible, it’s happening all the time.
So, I don't know if it's restricted to references, whether it's film or books. It simply is just part of a culmination of your cultural experience and your consumption of certain interesting works, whether it's paintings or literature. In my case, I cannot pinpoint it. I do have to say that I got drawn to certain writers, but not in the sense that I read all of their books, but because they somehow seeped a certain dose of tenderness into my soul. So yes, that's why sometimes they ask me and I say, well, off the top of my head I think about Primo Levi. Because when I started reading his work, I was taken by it, of course. It's not like it overwhelmed my life, but I was so touched by it. There was a period, very long ago, where I would always take a book with me. And I vaguely that I would read one or two pages just before I fell asleep. I would read until I’d come across a couple of sentences would give me a certain kind of consolation, and that was it, I would shut the book and fall asleep. I'm sure this has influenced my work, at least minimally. And I'm sure that all of us probably have this in different ways in our lives, but you can’t pinpoint this exactly.

:And what would you say are some of your cinematic influences?

SULEIMAN: I can only precisely that, thirty years ago, I think it was... Tokyo Story. I saw it for the first time, I didn’t even know who the director was, but I I just looked at it and said, “Oh my God, I can make something like that.” And I had never studied cinema. I didn’t even have a love for cinema and hadn’t ever thought about how it can be done. But I had the desire to do something in my life after seeing Tokyo Story, and I started to think that maybe I can also do that. That was just an initial departure. And then, similarly, I when I started to watch the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, I was thinking that these films reminded me of my background: of Nazareth, of my parents, of the alienation of living under Israeli rule, of the kind of alienated regard of my parents looking at what happened to their world, because it was taken away. They would have this post-siesta coffee on the balcony, and I would sit with them and I could see feel their silence to be a melancholic silence. I’m certain this is in my films, I can’t be 100 percent sure of it, but I’m sure that this moment inspired other moments that I have captured, that had an alienating feeling.

I tried to avoid talking about certain movies a certain way mostly out of precaution of misinterpreting it, but specially most of the time it’s to acknowledge the fact that I will never know the complete background and intricacies when it comes in the creation of art so powerful, so invigorating. Most of the reviews point out those artists when talking to Suleiman and I get it, but cinema can’t just be a monolith of references in that sense. And the more I try to expand the ways I see movies (especially with my partner) the more I try to acknowledge that last thing Suleiman said. There will always be that insecurity of not completely getting where your images come from, but there’s certainly an entire life experience behind all of it.
What I get from it is the absurdism of a normalized evil meeting the absurdism of documenting the history of your own community. Suleiman appears as himself and as a fictional version of himself. He's an actor and director. The real him trying to explain his entire cinematic philosophy and the fictional construct being the recreation of a simple trifle exacerbated into a macrocosm of the problem with language itself, translating a commentary of his incapability to speak to the audience it wants to share all his knowledge with. So the entire artifice becomes his channel to get through the notions of his own existence. What starts as title cards that progress each individual vignette slowly reveals the interaction of a life in between a political submission and the inevitable act of reclamation through one’s own participation on the dynamics of these anecdotes. We strive for answers, but what we only get is a cycle of going from point A to point A. The context being the idiocy of having the people who warrant your house being also the ones that coordinate how to piss in a wall. And, despite the comedy of a sad and lonely life, it is one where it is impossible not to respond, even in the most trivial of ways. Every form of resistance is one worth its effort.