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***/**** starring Hiam Abbas, Karim Daoud Anaya, Yasmine Al Massri, Jeremy Irons written and directed by Annemarie Jacir
by Angelo Muredda “A new page in history is written today,” a stodgy Englishman pronounces at a launch for the first state-sponsored radio broadcast in so-called Mandatory Palestine early on in Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine ’36. Although the boast is met with eye-rolls from the few well-to-do Palestinians in the mostly colonial British audience, one of whom jokes to her partner that “this is the part where they elevate us,” the line ironically serves as a good encapsulation of Jacir’s project to make something significant and new out of a familiar form. A mainstream historical epic that hits its dramatic beats with energy if not freshness, and which demonstrates classical filmmaking chops if not revolutionary aesthetics, Palestine ’36 can’t help but feel like a turning of the page in spite of its modest aesthetic choices. In the frankness with which it dramatizes the Great Revolt of the late 1930s against the British occupation and its military support for the Zionist project, the film is a rebuke to the representational lacunae that make up Western depictions of the history of the Middle East and the Palestinian liberation movement, which usually gets barely named at all.
Jacir anchors the present movement, in all its daily indignities as well as its countless acts of resilience, in this crushing historical antecedent. As the birds-eye-view title suggests, Jacir doesn’t centre her history on a single viewpoint from the doomed revolt but rather on the changing fortunes of a host of characters on different sides of it. On the British side, we meet a host of degenerates like Captain Wingate (Robert Aramayo, channeling Ralph Fiennes’s Nazi officer from Schindler’s List), disillusioned but weak-willed middle-management officials like Hopkins (Billy Howle), and doddering old colonial administrators like High Commissioner Wauchope, played by Jeremy Irons in what feels like a nod to his ill-fated diplomatic post in M. Butterfly.
The main Palestinian protagonist is Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), a soft-spoken young man who finds his loyalties initially torn between the villagers at highest risk of displacement and the urbanites most in the good graces of the British. Yusuf crosses paths with both multi-generational families, such as that of matriarch Hanan (Hiam Abbas), her spirited daughter Rabab (Yafa Bakri), and her precocious granddaughter Afra (Wardi Eilabouni), whose lives are threatened by an encroaching settlement, and middle-class aspirants such as journalist Khuloud (Yasmine Al Massri) and her moderate husband Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine), who wants to play by the British rules of land ownership and assembly. Before long, the crisis comes to Yusuf’s door, and his decision of whether to buy a suit and fly under Amir’s wing as a member of the ineffectual local Muslim association or to join dockworker Khalil (Saleh Bakri) in the armed struggle is made for him–a fate we see repeated throughout as characters make the choice to submit in the face of partition or put their lives on the line and fight for their homes, their families, and their dignity. Against this backdrop, we get only furtive glances at families of Jewish migrants from Europe, who, a sympathetic but anxious Rabab tells Afra, have been cruelly turned away from European countries, with the more well-connected Zionist organizers and activists depicted as offscreen forces, heard but mostly not seen.
Opening about twenty years into British rule in the territory–which a title card informs us is “The year you were born,” in loving reference to Jacir’s father–the film makes no secret of its didactic purpose to showcase an under-depicted period of struggle that continues today from a perspective rarely portrayed on such a large scale. As a Palestinian answer to nation-building romances like Otto Preminger’s Exodus, Palestine ’36 is stirring stuff, even if one wonders about the political utility of the accessible package. Perhaps anticipating that critique, Jacir balances her schematically chosen character viewpoints with interstitial archival videos, colourized and restored footage of markets, docks, and crowds in Palestine in the late 1930s, interpolating those clips within the fictionalized narrative to create a sense of the liveness of this time and space. Between remarkable on-location photography that spanned Jordan, Palestine, the West Bank, and Jaffa against a backdrop of occupation and genocide and the archival footage, the film itself is an impressive record of Palestinian endurance.
Impressive as Palestine ’36 is as a political document, its impact is nevertheless blunted by some of its thematic and aesthetic choices, not least of which the apparent use of generative AI tools to smooth the archival footage, which lends an uncanny smeariness to the image that paradoxically takes away from its indexicality. Presumably, the choice hinges on the desire to animate history and drag it into the present through colour, yet it betrays a lack of confidence. Likewise, the decision to render so many of the Palestinian characters as stoic and reluctant participants in these events, dragged into their destiny by colonial violence, detracts from some of the evocative performances, making more tonally varied characters like Aramayo’s villain pop by contrast.
Though Anaya cuts a striking figure as the relatively saintly Yusuf, Jacir fares better with the more shaded depictions of Khuloud and Amir. The former is an intellectual who isn’t above schmoozing with the occupier but draws the line at their tacit support for apartheid, while the latter is a compromised busybody who allows himself to be wielded as controlled opposition, first to the Arab general strike and then to the armed rebellion. Jacir also highlights a striking contrast between Hopkins’s unprincipled opposition to the brutishness of Wingate and aloofness of Wauchope and the more organic revolt of local boy Kareem (Ward Helou) and his father (Jalal Altawil), a pacifist priest who teaches his son to endure however he can. For all his sympathies with the Palestinian people, Hopkins can’t fathom the idea of remaining as the Revolution unfolds, washing his hands of the people he commiserates with and proclaiming “I quit Palestine” as soon as the military campaign on one side and the revolt on the other intensifies. And Kareem has to decide whether to endure silently, as his father suggested, or bear arms while he’s still a child. As diagrammatic as Palestine ’36 can sometimes be, there’s an elegance and a grace to these contrasts that cast the grandness of Jacir’s canvas of a people in crisis into relief. They show that in times of moral emergency, there is one easy way to opt out of the fight but any number of ways to resist.
