Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir’s historic drama Palestine 36 brought down the house at the Roy Thomson Hall on Friday evening as the film world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The feature explores the 1936-39 Arab Revolt in which Palestinians rose up against Britain’s colonial rule, against a backdrop of rising Jewish immigration following the country’s support for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine with the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
Jacir has delivered a sweeping historical epic bringing 1930s Palestine to life and tackling a key chapter in Palestinian history not seen on the big screen before.
In the works since before the Covid-19 pandemic, Palestine 36 debuted in Toronto amid rising world condemnation of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza sparked by Israel’s near two-year military campaign in the Palestinian territory in response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks.
Cast members Yasmine Al Massri, Karim Daoud Anaya and Zaid Ghazal posed on the red carpet with a plastic bag containing a camera and a Palestinian keffiyeh drenched in fake blood in protest at the rising death toll now standing at least 63,000 people, while Jacir told reporters she had not expected to premiere the film “during a genocide”.
TIFF head Cameron Bailey suggested the 15-minute ovation – which he had to cut short to leave time for an onstage Q&A – was one of the longest in the history of the festival.
After tackling more intimate Palestinian stories in Salt of the Sea (2008), When I Saw You (2012) and Wajib (2017), Palestine 36 is Jacir’s most ambitious to date and fulfils a long-held desire to bring the period to the big screen.
“What happened in 1936, sets the stage for what happens 12 years later. Everybody talks about 1948 and everything after, but the roots of all this begin so much earlier. I’m obsessed with the period. I’ve read everything I can get my hands,” the director tells Deadline prior to the Toronto premiere.
Books on her reading list included Rashid Khalidi’s ‘The Hundred Years’ War On Palestine’; Ilan Pappé’s ‘The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine’, as well as the works of assassinated Palestinian author and militant Ghassan Kanafani and academics such as Charles Anderson and Matthew Hughes.
“What struck me was the way that people didn’t foresee what was going to happen and how bad it would get. None of the characters in the film have a clue that The Nakba (catastrophe) is coming in 12 years,” the director continues, referring to the Palestinian term for the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab Israeli War.
“I don’t want to do any spoilers for people who haven’t seen the film, but you have a character like Amir who ends up collaborating. We can’t really judge him. He doesn’t know his beautiful house in Jerusalem will be gone. He’s simply thinking about modernization and business. He wants to be a modern guy. This is how these things happen. They start in small, unobvious ways.”
Philistine Films
The storyline encompasses a wide cross-section of Palestinian characters, living either in the burgeoning urban hubs of Jerusalem and Jaffa, or the countryside.
Hiam Abbass (Gaza Mon Amour, Succession), is dignified peasant woman Hanan; Kamel El Basha (The Insult), village leader Abu Rabab; Al Massri (The Stranger’s Case), high society Jerusalemite figure-turned-activist Khuloud Atef; Saleh Bakri (Wajib), an exploited Jaffa dockworker-turned-armed militant Khalid and Dhafer L’Abidine (Children of Men), ambitious businessman Amir.
Newcomer Karim Daoud Anaya, who appeared as a young parkour expert in the 2014 documentary Qalqilya: Where Palestinian Boys Are Learning To Fly, plays Yusuf, a young man hailing from the countryside trying to make his way in Jerusalem as a chauffeur and assistant to Amir.
British actors bring a trio of real-life historical figures to life. Robert Aramayo (Game of Thrones) is chilling as Captain Wingate, whose brutality against Palestinians is well-documented; Liam Cunningham is the equally brutal colonial officer Charles Tegart, and Jeremy Irons, is Arthur Grenfell Wauchope, the ineffectual High Commissioner for Palestine and Trans-Jordan at the time of the revolt.
Billy Howle (Infinite Storm) also appears as young government official Thomas Hopkins who is not unsympathetic to the Palestinian cause but has his hands tied.
“From the beginning, it was going to be an ensemble piece. It wasn’t going to be like Salt of The Sea, When I saw You or Wajib, which were focused on the duality of two characters,” said Jacir.
“This one was always one village and its relationship with Jerusalem, these physical spaces, and then several characters that speak to the different things that are happening at the time. The way I conceived it was in chapters, with each chapter focusing on a different person… which I then weaved together, so the overall story is about all of them, not just one single person.”
“I think this approach gives the bigger story a more intimate feel. This is a big epic film, but I also feel like it’s personal, small and intimate. It’s about these moments in each of their lives where they’re confronted with something; make a decision, and that decision changes everything else for them.”
Philistine Films
Jacir does not hold back in capturing the brutality of British rule in Palestine, showing the documented British army practice of tying prisoners to jeep bumpers as human shields, or collective punishments such as gathering people in open-air wire cages in the heat, without water or food, and blowing up houses or whole villages, suspected of having ties with the revolt.
This has not stopped the British Film Institute (BFI) and BBC Films coming on board as key funders alongside the likes of Qatar’s Doha Film Institute and Katara Studios, and Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Fund.
“I think the British have come to an understanding of colonialism and their colonial past. In general, they have confronted their past. They’re not trying to hide it. All of this is, is what it is. A way to move forward is to recognize our histories,” said Jacir.
“For the BBC, the BFI and the British producers and co producers, I think it’s something that they feel strongly about, that it’s time to tell these stories, to see the other side. There was no suggestion of hiding anything or making it softer. I’m curious how it will be for UK audiences… so many of us come from countries that were colonized, it’s very universal in a way.”
Jacir said the British cast members were equally committed to the telling the story. She highlights Aramayo’s preparation for the role of Captain Wingate.
“He was incredible to work with. He read everything about Wingate, every single biography, book. He’s learning Arabic. He became really obsessed with the character. The film makes Wingate look a little less crazy than he was… there are accounts of him being naked with his troops and wearing garlic around his neck and an alarm clock on his wrist,” she said.
“Thomas Hopkins represents official British policy in this film. Wingate is somebody who went off… some people see him as a hero, a sort of godfather of guerrilla warfare, for us, he was a terror. He was an evangelist, who he felt was on a divine mission in the to save Holy Land, with some Biblical fantasy in his head.”
Jacir also makes use of British archives, which she had colorized, to recreate the feel 1930s Palestine on the production’s limited budget.
“The British were amazing at filming and photographing and they have incredible archives with beautiful images of life as it was in Palestine… this is a huge film for us, but in a global cinema sense, it’s got a small budget. We’re not Hollywood. I couldn’t make huge city scenes,” says Jacir.
“I felt I have to do it in my way with smaller lens, focusing on certain things but the archives really helped us show that world as it was.”
She took inspiration from Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson’s 2018 restoration and colorization of archive from the UK’s Imperial War Museum to create the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old.
“It’s just incredible to see people’s faces in color, to see their clothing, the world really comes alive. I felt like artistically that this was really important to do. The archives are as they exist. We simply cleaned them up and colorized them,” says Jacir.
While the storyline focuses on Britain’s treatment of the Palestinian population, the implications of the rising Jewish population and land purchases by organizations groups such as the Jewish National Fund are woven into the story.
There is no condemnation of the Jewish arrivals, however, with Jacir acknowledging the political events back in Europe that were encouraging Jewish people to move to Palestine in the 1930s, with archive of their arrivals in the port of Haifa.
“It was important to remind people that Jewish refugees who were coming here, were escaping fascism in Europe. It’s something that needs to be remembered for sure. In the archive images at the beginning of the film, it was important for me to include not only life in Jerusalem but also archive of refugees coming off boats,” says Jacir.
“We see these little kids, old men. The last piece of archive of that section shows this Nazi passport. It shows what people were fleeing from, I wanted that. It was important that that was in the film,” says Jacir.
Challenging shoot
The production was poised to begin principal photography close to the central West Bank city of Salfit on October 14 2023, with shoots also planned for Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Jaffa.
These plans disintegrated in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel, which killed 1,200 people and resulted in the taking of 251 hostages.
“We had prepped so long and so hard for this film. It was huge for us. We started 10 months in advance, when the norm is three months.”,” recounted Jacir. “It felt like all of Palestine was working on this film. People were building, we had craftsmen, woodsmiths, iron workers…”
The production had constructed the village at the heart of the story and even planted tobacco and cotton crops as part of the backdrop.
“When the bottom fell out, it was so devastating. I wasn’t able to talk about it for a long time. We all needed, all wanted to continue making the film. At the same time, people were losing their lives,” added Jacir.
After holding out to shoot in the West Bank as planned, Jacir and Ossama Bawardi, her life partner and long-time producer at joint company Philistine Films acknowledged that the production would have to move.
“We kept waiting and waiting, and then the producers started coming to me with other options, Cyprus, Greece, saying no-one is going give us insurance cover, no actors are going to come,” said Jacir.
She agreed to shift the shoot to Jordan in the spring of 2024, but the challenges did not stop there.
After Israel killed Iranian military officials in an airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus in April 2024, Iran launched a retaliatory attack involving more than 300 drones, cruise and ballistic missiles, many of which flew over Jordanian territory.
The incident briefly shutdown the production and resulted in the international cast and crew evacuating for a time.
“I felt like we were on Candid Camera, and someone was making crazy things happen to see how we were going to react,” recounts Jacir.
“It wasn’t just big things like the missile attack, that same night Saleh Bakri was bitten by a scorpion. He’s asleep, feels something on his neck, goes to brush it off and finds a scorpion in his hand and flings it across the room. He woke up Karim, the guy who plays Yusuf, and they ran to the hospital together.”
Deadline visited the set in July 2024 as the cast and crew braved blasting sun and temperatures in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit in northern Jordan, shooting scenes in which British forces terrorized villages suspected of being involved militant activities.
The mood was raw on set, as the death toll in Gaza continued to rise – approaching 37,000 dead at the time – but there was a quiet determination in the air as young Palestinian crew members alongside international technicians worked to get the production over the line.
Across the valley from the location where the shoot was taking place, there were views into the Galilee, and mobile phones intermittently pick up Israeli telecom signals, hitting home how close, yet how far the set was from its originally intended site in the West Bank.
Jacir recounts how unexpected events carried on into post-production, which was mainly done in the UK.
“French cinematographer Hélène Louvart was due to join me on the first day of color grading in London.” she says.
“She was due in from Paris on Eurostar and I get a text from her at six in the morning saying an unexploded World War Two bomb had been discovered close the track so the everything was shut down. We had to postpone.”
A sense of national responsibility
Following its world premiere in Toronto, Palestine 36 heads next to the BFI London Film Festival in October, while it has already been acquired by a slew of European distributors including Curzon for the UK. The film is also Palestine’s entry this year and will be on the fall awards circuit.
Bawardi believes the film’s legacy will go beyond its festival career and theatrical release.
“I see the film as a national responsibility on all of us,” he told Deadline on set in 2024. “It’s an historical document. It’s going to stay for a thousand years. Our names are on it and it carries a lot of responsibility and weight.”
He also hoped that the film would likely spark intelligent debate.
“The purpose of the film is to raise questions. Making a film that answers questions, that doesn’t change anything, but making a film that raises questions and starts discussions, this is the whole purpose behind our work,” he said.
“This is what I mean by national responsibility, raising questions for the world, for us Palestinians, and Arabs in general. It’s not about giving a lesson, or doing speech, it’s about getting people thinking and talking about it.”
Palestine 36 is produced by Bawardi for Philistine Films (The Stranger’s Case) and co-produced by Cat Villiers for Autonomous (The Proposition) and Hani Farsi and Nils Åstrand for Corniche Media (The Time That Remains) in the UK, Olivier Barbier for MK Productions (The Worst Person In The World) in France. Also on board are Katrin Pors for Snowglobe (Godland) in Denmark as well as Azzam Fakhrildin and Hamza Ali.
The film is financed by the BFI (awarding National Lottery funding), BBC Film, Doha Film Institute and Katara Studios, Watermelon Pictures, Red Sea Fund, Roya Media Group (Fares Sayegh and Michael Sayegh), Metafora Productions, Cocoon Films, TRT, the Jordan Film Fund, Koala VFX, the Danish Film Institute, Film I Väst, Sørfond, CNC – Aide au Cinema du Monde, Région Ile-de-France.
Paris-based mk2 Films and Lucky Number are co-handling international sales.
