Annemarie Jacir’s period drama arrives in the U.S. a month after the BAFTAs, effectively Britain’s Oscars, where I Swear star Robert Aramayo beat Leonardo DiCaprio and Michael B. Jordan to the Best Actor award. Any Americans wondering how a supporting actor from Game of Thrones went on to achieve such a stunning upset will have to wait another month until that film gets a Stateside release. In Palestine ’36, however, his talents are swallowed up by an ensemble cast in a multi-stranded film that never quite makes the sum of its parts.
Ironically, though the scenario in the Middle East is still unfolding and very much a political hot potato, there have been several recent attempts to trace the roots of the situation, starting in 2022 with Darin J. Sallam’s Farha. Michael Winterbottom followed in 2023 with Shoshana (a film that premiered a full month before the horrors of October 7), and last year saw Cherien Dabis’s sprawling epic All That’s Left of You make the Oscar shortlist.
All these films prioritize the viewpoint of the innocent, and Palestine ’36 is no exception. The problem with this focus is that it makes information hard to parse, since we only know what the characters know. That’s fine when the film is out in the fields but tricky when the setting moves to Jerusalem and the very complicated politics of the day come into play.
The title refers to a particularly significant year for the world, not just for Palestine, with war brewing in Europe and Britain’s beleaguered King Edward under pressure to abdicate. Inspired by the British Mandate, which saw the UK inherit the region from the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the influx of Jewish settlers has begun in earnest. Meanwhile, the British government has big plans for the region, as we see in early scenes showing a radio broadcast being set up by High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope (Jeremy Irons), whose hesitance to act against terrorism early on is seen as the key to what came later.
The Arab point of view is brought to us through Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), a country boy who splits his time between his village, where the locals grow cotton, and Jerusalem, where he runs errands for a newspaper editor and his increasingly outspoken, anti-Zionist wife. At home, the villagers are disturbed when settlers start to encroach on their land, but after one of the elders is shot and killed during a dispute with their new neighbors, the British side violently with the settlers.
After that, the film basically offers a series of reactions. The villagers become sympathetic to the revolutionaries, who hide in the hills, and increasingly radicalized. In the city, reactions are more mixed within the Arab elite class, causing a rift between the business community and the intellectuals.
No faction is more divided than the British, however, with benign diplomat Thomas Hopkins (Billy Howle) at odds with the almost feral Army captain Orde Wingate (Aramayo), reputed father of the modern IDF. Interestingly, the most prophetic words come from an Irishman, police officer Charles Tegart (Liam Cunningham), who notes, “We don’t need another Ireland on our hands.”
In the same way characters come and go, bulletins from the outside world pop up as backdrop, with references to The Balfour Declaration and, more pertinently, the upcoming Peel Commission, which, published the following year, would open the gates to partition. It’s certainly refreshing to be credited with some intelligence, but the visual storytelling doesn’t quite hit the same spot, often falling back on old tropes about cycles of violence that create new cycles of violence, as well as some old chestnuts such as a little boy wielding a big gun and a little girl who somehow sees a light at the end of the tunnel.
In that sense, it’s hardly a primer, since a level of knowledge is certainly expected, and although the politics never profess to being more than deftly sketched, there’s a sense that quite a lot of nuance is missing. As a history lesson, however, it’s a decent attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable.
Title: Palestine ’36Director-screenwriter: Annemarie JacirCast: Karim Daoud Anaya, Hiam Abbass, Saleh Bakri, Robert Aramayo, Yasmine Al Massri, Billy Howle, Dhafer L’Abidine, Ward HelouDistributor: Watermelon PicturesRunning time: 1 hr 41 mins
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