One important film at this year’s Asian World Film Festival Los Angeles has been Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 – film about the Arab anti-colonial uprising in the 1930s that reopens the sordid of Britain’s colonial history in Palestine. As the whole world focuses on Gaza, a film about the history of the conflict in the Middle East could not be more timely. However, Annemarie Jacir’s epic film has many other strengths. It is grand in scale, ambitious in storytelling and balanced in the way it pays equal attention to historical scope and detailed characterization. The film, which is Palestine’s entry to the Oscars, has a lot of story to tell, but still manages to singularly draw its many characters and to give specificity to its different locations.
The current situation in Israel and Palestine goes back to 1917 and Balfour Declaration, a pledge made by the British government in the words of the late historian Eric Hobsbawn – “incautiously and ambiguously promised to establish a ‘national home for the Jews’ in Palestine,” One of the consequences of the end of World War I was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The December before the Armistice in November 1918, troops under the command of General Sir Edmund Allenby (nicknamed “The Bull”) captured Jerusalem. After the end of the war, The League of Nations “mandated” (handed over) what was then Palestine to British rule. That rule lasted until 1948. Then the British withdrew. The region’s Jewish and Arab populations were left to fight it out.
What is so important about 1936 in Palestine? Palestinian-American director Annemarie Jacir explains: “We always start talking about Palestine in 1948. But this is the origin of where we are today.” She is referring to the 1936-39 Arab Revolt against British rule in Palestine, as depicted in her new film Palestine 36 — the first to address the uprising, she says. It’s a rousing historical epic that chronicles the failed birth of a nation, and the brutal quelling of rebels seeking to resist Arab displacement precipitated by swiftly rising Jewish migration.
These years set the fuse for a conflict that has now reached a catastrophic peak. “It’s the Palestinian point of view of that period,” Jacir says. “We grew up hearing these stories from our families, but they’re nowhere in any kind of educational system, they’re not in films. This is an epic story, but it’s very personal. My father lived it, my mother, my grandparents. And, sadly, so much of it is still happening now. The revolt was a moment of possibility and what could have been, but it got crushed and it was the beginning of everything falling apart.”
This is a heartfelt film, if rather stolidly paced and sometimes pedagogically conveyed. Jacir coolly laces her dialogue with echoes of the future: Wingate fiercely espouses his belief in a Zionist future for the region and tells a sceptic, “Perhaps you should consider what side of history you want to be on.” There is another complex reverberation when a Palestinian worker says: “They are replacing us with Jewish labor!”
The heart of the story is Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), a village boy who gets a job in Jerusalem with a worldly, centrist-liberal newspaper editor who is not averse to making an accommodation with Zionism. Yusuf is not particularly political but is inevitably radicalized by the brutal British. None of these characters quite flares passionately into life but all are persuasively portrayed.
The Jews seen by Palestine 36’s Arab characters are mostly settlers glimpsed briefly from afar. However, Jacir alludes in her film to the European antisemitism that drove Jews to Palestine and uses archive footage to add awful context to the influx. “I chose archive scenes which I find so heartbreaking with people coming off the boats, fleeing fascism to a place of safety. It was important for the audience to see the moment when the Jewish immigrants’ IDs are checked, and one of them opens a Nazi passport. It’s terrifying.”
Jacir’s film, which is beautifully lensed by a trio of cinematographers led by the great Hélène Louvart, follows many interconnected characters from all walks of life living in Jerusalem and its surrounding villages as they live through the immense changes that took place in 1936.
The whole cast includes Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya, in raw and tender debut performance), a farmer who also has a job helping out Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine), a bourgeois leader in the city who colludes with the Zionist agenda in hopes of securing his elite status, and his wife Khouloud (Yasmine Al Massri), a radical journalist who writes under a male pseudonym.
Then there is the dock worker Khalid (Saleh Bakri), who soon becomes one of the revolt’s leaders; young villager Afra (Wardi Eilabouni), her mother Rabab (Kamel El Basha), and her grandparents (Hiam Abbass and Kamel El Basha) whose way of life becomes threatened by settlers and the British Army who “protect” them; Father Boulos (Jalal Altawil), a Christian priest, and his son Kareem (Ward Helou) who find themselves targeted by the army just for existing.
Among the British in the film are a cadre of British diplomats and soldiers, including High Commissioner Wauchope (Jeremy Irons), who says he believes in helping both sides, but only seems to help the settlers, the compassionate Commissioner Thomas (Billy Howle), who advocates for a free and independent Palestinian state and feeds information to Khouloud, Charles Tegart (Liam Cunningham), an anti-insurgents expert who had previously served in India, and Captain Wingate (Robert Aramayo), a Zionist who inflicts unwarranted violence on the villagers and refers to all Palestinians as “animals.”
All their stories are intertwined with archival footage of ordinary life in Jerusalem at the time, from busy marketplaces, to lush fields, to the picturesque seascapes, which offer a brief glimpse into the country’s vibrant past. Jacir’s screenplay is filled with nuggets of Palestinian history, from the launch of the Palestine Broadcasting Service, the general strike, and the beginning of the farmer-led revolt in 1936 to the Peel Commission, which in 1937 recommended the removal of Palestinians from their land and plan to partition Mandatory Palestine, paving the way for the founding of the State of Israel a decade later.
Her script also alludes to earlier historical moments for the country, like the Sykes–Picot Agreement, the women’s movement’s silent protest of 1929, and even the British occupation of Ireland. Crafted as a Palestinian counter-narrative to something like Otto Preminger’s star-studded 1960 Hollywood epic Exodus, Jacir’s film may be brimming with facts and historical allusions that add context to the on-going violence in the region, but it’s a humanist film at its heart, remaining deeply rooted in the lives of its characters, their relationships with their community, their love for their people, and their enduring connection to their ancestral land.
The storytelling in Palestine 36 is marked by constant physicality. Violence is bodily – faces are struck, bodies are constrained or tied down, as eyes cry and noses bleed – but so too is the affection: a hug between comrades, a fleeting touch between potential lovers, an embrace of a caring grandmother. When the village comes together, picking up and throwing stones at the British military hiding behind their armored cars, the contrast becomes even clearer. Therein lies the story of how these people persevered and resisted despite the violence constantly coming at them. Palestine 36 resonates because it binds the personal to the political, showing how resistance emerges in both quiet and explosive forms. Jacir’s film reminds that history is not abstract, but lived through families and small moments of solidarity and conflict. By uniting epic scope with intimate detail, it delivers a portrait of a people fractured yet unbroken
