Palestine 36 Portrays a Historical Period Often Overlooked by the West

The bustling street scenes and seaside images that open and are interspersed throughout Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 are not period-movie re-creations. They are real archival images shot by the British occupying forces at the time and that the filmmaker restored and colorized for this movie. An intriguing way to get around budgetary limitations, perhaps, but also a subtle rebuke to the idea that Palestine was sitting barren and uninhabited before the creation of Israel and its supposed blooming of the desert. The whole movie could be seen as an attempt to push back against some common historical misconceptions. The title says it all: We hear so much about 1948 — whether one thinks of it as the post-WWII establishment of Israel, or the Nakba (“catastrophe”), as it’s known to Palestinians — that the crucial period before it is often ignored.

Jacir’s absorbing film takes place during the 1936–39 Arab revolt, which was a response to British rule and the colonial authority’s partnership with newly arriving Jewish refugees from Europe. Indeed, the British are the primary villains here, favoring the newcomers and regularly humiliating the Arabs; the Jewish settlers go mostly unseen save for some archival footage showing them arriving on ships. The locals at first regard the newcomers with curiosity, but soon rumors spread of settlers arming themselves, burning villages, and taking jobs away from workers. Caught between town and country is Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), a young well-educated villager who takes a job in Jerusalem working for Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine), a wealthy businessman and publisher who often entertains British officials at his parties. At night, Yusuf goes back to his village, where his family is regularly brutalized by the local authorities, led by the snarling protomillenarian Captain Wingate (played by Robert Aramayo, whom some will recognize as the young actor who scored an upset win at the BAFTAs last month for I Swear).

As the gentle Yusuf, Anaya doesn’t quite have the charisma to pull off such a passive character. He spends much of the film observing, and his initial inaction is supposed to be frustrating — but we can’t quite read curiosity or compassion or fear or much of anything in his eyes. Even when he eventually joins the resistance, we can’t get a handle on the character, largely because he hasn’t been given much shading or dimensionality; his expression barely changes throughout. The supporting cast, which includes such legends as Saleh Bakri and Hiam Abbass, is tremendous, but in a way their presence highlights Yusuf’s inadequacy as a protagonist. We spend more time wondering about them than we do about him. Jeremy Irons shows up as General Arthur Wauchope, Britain’s notorious high commissioner for Palestine, who oversaw the collective punishment of Arabs during the revolt and the massive transfer of land to the settlers, and he makes a perfectly smug, patronizing official, pretending to appease both sides while clearly favoring one.

Palestine 36 offers an interesting and valuable perspective on a relatively unknown period in history, though I wish it wasn’t so thinly spread out. Jacir wants to show a cross section of people’s responses to these events, but the result often feels like scattershot scenes from a longer miniseries, flitting from one character to another with little narrative thrust or cohesion. This results not just in a dilution of the drama, but it also leads to confusion: When the narrative picks certain characters back up, we may have forgotten who they were. And the decision not to show the Jewish settlers, while understandable — Jacir wants to focus on the Arabs’ struggle against the British, who were the prime movers behind the events of 1936 — feels like a misstep. Not for reasons of both-siderism but because by consigning the other side to the shadows, the director undermines her thesis: The film posits (accurately) that the British were manipulating and exploiting these settlers and playing them off the Palestinians, but because we never see the settlers, we never actually see this process in action.

Palestine 36 is worth seeing, but it also feels like a compromised work. Jacir, the talented filmmaker behind Salt of This Sea (2008) and When I Saw You (2012), had to ditch many of her locations after October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza. Something similar happened to Cherien Dabis and her excellent epic Palestinian drama, All That’s Left of You, which premiered at Sundance last year. There’s something to be said for the persistence of these artists in grinding through and realizing such elaborate historical films in the face of enormous, unforeseen, catastrophic logistical challenges. At a time when our movies feel as though they’re getting smaller and more meaningless, it’s refreshing to see works of such sweep and ambition, whatever their flaws may be.