Palestine 36 review - memories of a nation

“Rebellion begins with a breath,” an opening aphorism declares in this first film recounting Palestine’s 1936-39 Arab Revolt, long historically supplanted by Israel’s seismic 1948 founding.

The Gaza War meant director Annemarie Jacir filmed under duress, with her original West Bank village set overrun by Jewish settlers and Jordan standing in, before a defiant return to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The war impacted Jacir in subtler ways, emotionally entailing a straightforward film shorn of levity or experiment. The result is a low-budget equivalent to David Lean, less interested in Lawrence of Arabia spectacle than disinterring buried memories, and documenting the descent towards an infernal Arab-Jewish struggle wrongly perceived as eternal.

Jacir’s wholly Palestinian perspective moves from the country to the city, and from Jaffa dockland unrest to the Jerusalem high society of glamorous Oxford-educated journalist Khuloud Atef (Yasmine Al Massri, pictured above second right). She lets her sobriety slip when village priest’s boy Kareem (Ward Helou) trips out to incense, chants and a freaky church mural of St George. Palestine’s then large Arab Christian population is incorporated as a cross in the national flag, part of a since shattered religious and cultural mix. There’s romance to galloping Arab cavalry robbing trains for the revolution, till a ruthless British crackdown. A torched village's orange glow burns through time.

British rule is represented by insipid High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope (Jeremy Irons, pictured below), his fictionalised pro-Arab representative Thomas Hopkins (Billy Howle) and vicious Christian Zionist Captain Wingate (Jeremy Aramayo), though the Arab ass named Lord Balfour would suffice. Attempts to defuse the real Balfour’s double-speak on Palestine’s fate are rarely even-handed, as Wingate’s joint British-Jewish units put the rebels down and partition to accommodate a Jewish homeland invites, Irons drawls, “traditional Arab generosity”. “Half a loaf is better than no loaf at all,” an Englishman says, as Jerusalem’s lights go out in protest.

Jews are experienced as distant European settlers, founding kibbutzim at Arab villagers’ expense. Like Michael Winterbottom’s Shoshana (2023), which takes Palestine 36’s timeline on to Israel’s founding from a Jewish perspective, Jacir notes the 20th century novelty of a burgeoning Jewish population in the country, drawn by Zionism and driven by Nazi peril. Colourised but otherwise unaltered archive footage has a soft, dreamy texture. Like the immersive new documentary With Hasan in Gaza, which was made from 2001 film of Khan Younis and Gaza City, they bring memories of a lost world back alive – here, Arabs wandering unsuspecting in a still intact nation. Other reels take care to show Jewish refugees from the Nazi Reich, the desperate case for a Jewish refuge visited on an existing Arab nation, under inadequate colonial rule.

Jacir has previously told a wide range of contemporary and past Palestinian tales, all, like this one, national nominees for a Foreign Language Oscar. There are longueurs where the strained production and desire to pack in every aspect of an important story dilute Palestine 36’s emotional currency, failing to sweep the viewer up as it might. This is still urgent, unapologetically partial but carefully considered history.

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