Sometimes The Most Courageous Act Is What You Don't Do

Shortly after my first novel, Blue Mondays, came out in the Netherlands in 1994, I got all kinds of requests. They varied from invitations to comment on the status of irony in contemporary society to an urgent request from a lady to meet her on the beach. After reading my novel, she came to the conclusion that I needed to be saved.
This was the first time that I discovered that the written word can give people the impression that your soul is in urgent need of saving. Well, I have nothing against the concept of saving, but I’d like to do the saving myself.
Among all those letters and cards there were more serious ones, like one from Hany Abu-Assad. He was a Palestinian who had moved to the Netherlands. He had written a screenplay, and he wanted me to redo the dialogue.
I was too proud to redo other people’s dialogue, but I offered to write a new screenplay for him. So I did. I wrote something called The Fourteenth Chicken. Hany Abu-Assad directed the movie. The reviews were mixed. I’m more than happy to share the blame, though I'd like to point out that where my original screenplay ended with a suicide attempt, the final movie ended with something that in my eyes very much looked like a wedding. But then again, according to some people, the whole concept of marriage might come close to spiritual suicide.
Now Hany Abu Assad has co-written and directed a movie called Paradise Now. It won several awards and The New York Times critic Stephen Holden was raving about it.
The movie, set in Palestine, is about two friends who become suicide bombers. Hany Abu-Assad raises the question: what is going on inside the mind of a suicide bomber? Go and see for yourself if he manages to answer this question.
P.S. That my fellow blogger Chad Post knows of the existence of the Bordewijk-Award, an award hardly known in the Netherlands itself, comes close to a miracle.