Paradise Now

Said (Kais Nashef) is a young Palestinian living in Nablus, and working as a mechanic. He gets his friend Khaled (Ali Suliman) a job, but the hot-tempered and impulsive Khaled quickly loses it. Suha (Lubna Azabal), a pretty, well-traveled young woman and the daughter of a well-known "martyr," brings ...more

Paradise Now opens strong, with a wordless confrontation at a checkpoint between an Israeli soldier and a clear-eyed Palestinian woman (who turns out to be Suha [Lubna Azabal]). In this brief, cannily shot and edited, prosaic little encounter, director Hany Abu-Assad focuses primarily on the eyes of the two characters as one tries to size the other up and the other defiantly resists being sized up. It's clear that in this quiet little seemingly inconsequential moment -- a moment that ...more