Annemarie Jacir balances raw emotion with intimate details in a choral historical drama set during the British Mandate of Palestine, starring Jeremy Irons and Hiam Abbas alongside lesser-known faces.
“Premonitory” is perhaps the most fitting word to describe “Palestine 36.” As the world’s attention is focused 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 its narrative, and balanced in the way it pays equal attention to historical scope and detailed characterization. The film, Palestine’s Oscar submission, has a lot of history to tell, yet it still manages to uniquely portray its numerous characters and give specificity to its different locations. It demands the audience’s full attention and earns it by the end.
Director: Annemarie Jacir
Writer: Annemarie Jacir
Stars: Jeremy Irons, Liam Cunningham, Robert Aramayo
As its title suggests, the film covers just over a year in Palestine, when it was a British colony. There is a nominal protagonist in Yousef (Karim Daoud Anaya), a young man who divides his time between Al Basma, the small farming village where he was born and still lives, and the sprawling city of Jerusalem, where he works as a driver for Amir (Dhafer L'Abidine), a prominent Palestinian journalist who also holds a second job as a political operative. In the village, farmers watch their lands shrink as settlers fleeing antisemitism in Europe seize portions of them. In the city, British officers, Palestinian freedom fighters, and journalists begin to shape their agenda for the inevitable conflict over the future of Palestine.
The story begins with almost disjointed fragments, capturing the lives and struggles of a few characters who rarely cross paths. Yet, its multiple threads soon converge into a comprehensive narrative of a nation on the brink of radical change. While a work of fiction, "Palestine 36" evokes a sense of historical depth through its rich characters and complex situations, as if drawn from a vast bibliography of real-life experiences.
In the village, we meet Yousef and his family. There's also his neighbor Rabab (Yafa Bakri), a widow with whom he's in love. Rabab's family, who also work the land, includes her parents (Hiam Abbas and Kamal El Basha) and her young daughter, Afra (Wardi Eilabouni). Afra has a friend in Kareem (Ward Helou), the young son of the village's Christian priest, Father Bolous (Jalal Altawil). Through these characters, Jacir weaves a web of interrelationships to show how life changes across generations.
In the city, we meet Amir's wife, Khuloud (Yasmine Al Massri), a journalist who writes under a male pseudonym because women weren't respected enough to be heard. There's also the British governor (Jeremy Irons) and his secretary (Billy Howle), who sympathizes with the Palestinian cause. Two themes emerge as central to the narrative: the silent but ruthless economic war for land, with bureaucratic processes that transform property ownership into a tool of dispossession, and the way citizens realize their country is being stolen from them and begin to organize resistance. Jacir's screenplay sharply depicts the class divide among Palestinians, contrasting rural farmers with the educated elite of the metropolis, with Yousef serving as the link between the two.
The film contains several scenes that could be considered brief and unique narratives in themselves. One scene, set on a train stopped by Palestinian freedom fighters, shows how people united to support the rebellion against the British Mandate. As their leader, Khaled (Saleh Bakri, in a deeply serious performance), begs for alms, the camera captures the camaraderie that develops among people who, just moments before, were mere strangers passing by.
As each passenger searches their pockets for money—or jewelry around their necks and on their hands—the camera captures, in their gazes, the common purpose they now share. Another image shows a group of British officers and their families having a picnic near the village where most of the action takes place. We see Palestinian children running around, treated like exotic beings, while the British carry chairs and tables under large umbrellas to protect themselves from the Mediterranean sun. Jacir uses all these images as evidence of how colonialism works: the British are there to spend their free time, and they apparently don't care how they leave or what their presence might change.
The narrative of “Palestine 36” is characterized by a constant physicality. The violence is bodily—faces are punched, bodies are constricted or tied up, people cry and noses bleed—but so is affection: an embrace between comrades, a fleeting caress between potential lovers, the hug of a loving grandmother. When the townspeople unite, gathering and throwing stones at the British soldiers hiding behind their armored vehicles, the contrast becomes even more stark. Therein lies the story of how these people persevered and resisted despite the constant violence that rained down upon them.
The performances are excellent and complement each other perfectly: a true ensemble piece where each actor enhances their fellow actors. The only missing element is Robert Aramayo as the villainous British military captain, who is only missing a curled mustache in the caricatured way the character is written and portrayed. Visually, “Palestine 36” is sumptuous, with period costumes and cinematography that capture the sweeping nature of the narrative (despite a few quirky touches in the crowd scenes).
“Palestine 36” resonates because it links the personal with the political, showing how resistance emerges in both quiet and explosive ways. Jacir’s film reminds us that history is not abstract, but rather lived through families and small moments of solidarity and conflict. By combining epic scope with intimate detail, it offers a portrait of a fractured yet unbreakable people. As it reaches its climax, the audience experiences a catharsis as history and contemporary reality intertwine.
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