Rarely do I rate a movie the lowest possible but for this one I just have to. Maybe it deserved a bit more for the cinematography that looked very professional but to me a movie isn't only about the quality of images. I'd rather watch a good story badly filmed than no story beautifully filmed. That's my opinion. Because this movie has no story at all, it's just a collage of shots that bring nothing. Yes everything is very well centered, almost OCD, but I didn't want to see art but a story. If I want to see art I go to a museum or I watch a documentary about art. This is supposed to be a movie so I expect a story or at least an attempt to it. You only get scenes with straight lines, everything nicely centered, neverending boring silent shots. Elia Suleiman is the writer, the director, the actor, so yes you get it, he's full of himself. He doesn't speak (or at least not in the first hour as I stopped the movie (sorry to use that word as it's not a movie)),he just walks around and looks at things. Those scenes where he looks at something don't seem to end, bring absolutely nothing to the supposed story. I read this was supposed to be a comedy. I guess I don't have a sense of humor then, or at least not the right one for this movie. I didn't laugh once, not even a tiny grin. As said before I only watched a bit more than one hour of It Must Be Heaven. After that I couldn't take it anymore and had to shut it down. Felt more like this must be hell. I almost never stop a movie once I start watching it, no matter how bad it is, just to have a honest opinion before reviewing, but in this case I just couldn't take it anymore. It's a mystery to me why this movie gets that kind of ratings, I don't get it and will never get it. At least I will have learned a good lesson, never again I'll watch something from Elia Suleiman.

It Must Be Heaven is sometimes funny. Other times, the conveyed point flies over your head, especially if you have no idea about the context that director Elia Suleiman wants those sequences to be taken in. Which involves the long-lasting identity crisis of Palestine and its differences with the nation of Israel and others. But even if you were well-versed with the context, the deadpan delivery of the story where Suleiman (in character) goes around in different cities to observe the parallels between his and other countries is slightly inaccessible. Throughout the film, I was looking at my watch to make the movie end sooner but it didn't happen as the story went around in circles and never becoming as funny as the opening sequence. TN.

(Watched and reviewed at the 12th Bengaluru International Film Festival (BIFFES).)

Elia Suleiman plays himself, while traveling through different places and making comparisons with his homeland, Palestine. It's full of symbolism and irony. It's a subtle comedy, but brilliant in the key points. To take advantage of everything that you see, you need to have a bit of knowledge about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to understand the little things and comparisons with the other societies seen in the film. The photography is beautiful, the film lives by it (there is practically no dialogue in the film),with perfect symmetry between scenes. I did not find anything pretentious about this, as some have pointed out, but rather a different way of romanticizing a delicate subject of great significance for the director.