If, when watching the nightly news, you turn and ask how anyone could possibly blow themselves up for the sake of social or religious belief, here is the film for you. Paradise Now begins peaceably at an Israeli checkpoint when a bomb of a car could be laden with explosives. It isn’t and the innocent driver is waved on. This deceptive start sets the metaphorical landscape as two of the driver’s friends, ordinary men, coax her broken car back into life. “One day things will be better,” she says. 

In a world of rocks, rubble and ruin, home is a wreck of a country with fatalism their only consolation. Yet tomorrow isn’t soon enough for a group of militants who decide it is time for the men to become martyrs. Is their willingness to oblige simply God’s will? Paradise Now is not that undemanding and finds much to say before it sets off its ideological bombshells. And it does so with an unexpected eloquence. The men shave their hair and, strapped with explosives, head for a wedding. One looses his nerve and his puppeteers are in pursuit. 

Paradise Now is an eye-opener. In stark contrast to the safety and comfort of our world, it humanises terrorists without patronising the subject, or its audience. Their ideals are neither upheld, nor demonised. It doesn’t expect compassion for the characters, though it does for their plight. “Under the occupation, we’re already dead,” says one man through weary eyes. Hard to imagine from this side of the television, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. Paradise Now offers a new perspective, and leaves judgement to you.

 // COLIN FRASER