Fausto Giudice, 14/1/2026
It began its public journey last
September at the Toronto Film Festival, then opened the Carthage Film Festival
last December. Nominated for Palestine for the Best International Film Oscar in
coming March, Palestine 36 is beginning its theatrical run these days in
Tunisia, France, and other countries, following its Palestinian premiere in
Gaza on December 22, and Egypt and Great Britain, where it was screened as
early as late December.
Annemarie Jacir's film is a true
event. It is the first film about the Great Palestinian Revolt, which saw a
confrontation between the Palestinian people and the British occupiers, aided
by armed Zionist settlers, for three long years, from 1936 to 1939. Its most
impressive sequence was a general strike that lasted six months. 100,000
British soldiers, the largest military force deployed in that empire “on which
the sun never set,” fought by all means an organized population resorting to a
thousand forms of resistance.
As in all anti-colonial struggles, a
dialectical combination of various forms and levels of struggle was witnessed.
The general strike launched from Jaffa on April 21, 1936, lasted 174 days,
until October 11. Approximate toll: 5,000 Palestinians killed and 2,000
detained, 200 British and 500 Jews killed.
The meaning and lessons of this
historical moment for Palestine and the world today are strikingly evident.
To tell this page of Palestine's
history, a mirror of the world today as it was yesterday, Annemarie Jacir had
the required background: A Christian Palestinian born in Bethlehem in 1974, she
now lives in Haifa after studying and working in the USA and France. She has
built a “portfolio” of cinematic works that enabled her to make her “magnum
opus” possible. The film was financed by about ten countries and produced by a
dozen producers, from the BBC and Denmark to Qatar, including foundations from
wealthy Palestinian families. Filming was an ordeal: it began in the West Bank
before October 7, was interrupted after, continued in Jordan, then resumed in
Palestine. The boundaries between historical fiction and contemporary reality
were very fluid. For instance, in a scene filmed in Nablus, British soldiers
use a young Palestinian villager as a human shield in front of their jeep. On
the same day, Israeli soldiers were filmed in reality tying a wounded
Palestinian to the hood of their jeep in Jenin.
The challenge for the director was:
how to tell, almost a century later, in an effective, convincing, and humanly
plausible way, a foundational historical period for a Palestinian, Arab, and
global audience? Jacir made choices:
1- Only two of the three collective
protagonists are shown in detail: the Palestinians and the British. The Jews –
immigrants and Zionist settlers – are only evoked, seen through the eyes of the
natives, for whom the kibbutzniks settling in their fortified farms appear as
alien invaders.
2- While the British characters –
High Commissioner, general, war criminal captain – are reconstructed versions
of real historical figures with their real names, the Palestinian characters
are fictional compositions based on real historical figures.
3- The contradictions within each
camp are not avoided, be it the betrayals on the Palestinian side or the
disagreements on repression on the British side.
4- As in all Annemarie Jacir films,
women and children are full-fledged characters, as far from the patriarchal
machismo of some Arab films as from the wokally correct rosewater Hollywood
feminism.
5- Finally, the film is and remains a
fictional reconstruction, avoiding didactic aspects and translating ideological
and political aspects through images, postures, attitudes, retorts, glances.
Questions and answers
The two characters that struck me the
most are:
1- that of the Palestinian journalist from Al Qods, Khulud
Atef, played by Yasmine Al Massri, a magnificent actress born in Lebanon to a
Palestinian father and Lebanese mother, whom we discovered in Nadine Labaki's Caramel
(2007)
2- that of Captain Wingate, played by British actor of Basque father Robert Aramayo
Khulud is a fictional character.
Wingate is a real historical figure. What is their relationship with historical
reality?
Read more
