Suleiman, an artistic advisor of the Doha Film Institute, is the first Palestinian director to receive the honour.
The European Film Academy will honour Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman with its European Achievement in World Cinema Award. He will be an honorary guest at the 35th European Film Awards ceremony to be held on December 10 in Reykjavik.
Suleiman wrote, directed and starred in his debut feature Chronicle Of A Disappearance in 1996. The film detailed his experiences returning to Israel and picked the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for debut feature at Venice.
Suleiman, whose most recent work It Must Be Heaven premiered in 2019 at Cannes, is the first Palestinian director to win this prestigious prize.
Born in Nazareth, the Palestinian writer, director, actor and producer moved to Jerusalem where the European Commission had entrusted him with the mission of creating a Film and Media Department at Birzeit University.
In 2002, he premiered in Cannes with Divine Intervention which received the festival’s Jury Award and the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize and went on to win the Screen International Award at the European Film Awards. He again premiered in Cannes in 2009 with The Time that Remains, which continued to be selected for the European Film Awards. His 2019 comic saga It Must Be Heaven, also premiered at Cannes where it received the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize and a Special Mention. The film was again selected for the European Film Awards.
Elia Suleiman is an artistic advisor of the Doha Film Institute and has received the Dutch Prince Claus Award as well as the Prize Henri-Jeanson by the French Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD) which annually celebrates an author in memory of one the greatest scriptwriters of French cinema.
