Anne-Marie Jacir, Director of “Palestine 36”: “We do not want a state, we just want to live” | film

I“It’s a black hole,” director and writer Anne-Marie Jacir tells me of 1936. Our discussion went back in time to the beginning of the first mass Palestinian revolt against British rule and Zionism. It is the year from which her latest film, Palestine 36, takes its name, and it is the year in which she heard about her entire life. She also believes that it is the origin of today’s reality – even if for others it is a historical void. “A lot of people don’t know, surprisingly, that the British were in Palestine,” says Jacir skeptically. “This film is for Palestinians. It is our untold story.”

The veteran director is certainly well-placed to tell the story: this is her fourth film to be selected for an Oscar in Palestine. Although it is an old film, it does not belong to the past. Despite years of executions, widespread arrests and villages destroyed under 30 years of British rule, she says history is alive. At one point in the film, a young Palestinian man is tied to the front of a vehicle by British soldiers as a human shield. While filming the scene in the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli soldiers on the same day tied a wounded Palestinian man to a military vehicle during a raid in Jenin. “Everything that is going on now was prepared at that time in 1936; everything the Israeli army does, in fact, is taken from that moment,” says Gasser.

We speak via video shortly after the premiere of Palestine 36 at the Toronto Film Festival to a 20-minute standing ovation. It is understandable that Jasser is overwhelmed by the matter. The 10-year project was “very hard to live with,” a gift, she says, from the cast and crew who persevered despite experiencing “the darkest moments in our history.”

As a premier Palestinian filmmaker, Jacir has a talent for bringing Palestinian experiences of exile and rebellion to the screen, particularly in When I Saw You, her second film set in the aftermath of the 1967 Israeli invasion of the West Bank, and, more recently, Duty (winner of 36 international awards).

However, “Palestine 36” is terribly applicable to the present moment. Days before our conversation, the UK moved, along with other countries, to recognize Palestinian statehood. Weeks earlier, global genocide researchers supported a resolution stating that Israel’s actions in Gaza met the legal definition of the crime. More than 65,000 Palestinians have been killed – a number that academics believe is an underestimate – since the October 7 attacks. In the occupied West Bank, forced displacement of Palestinians has intensified since then.

“There is genocide,” Gasser says. “I don’t want a state. I don’t care about a state. We just want to live. This is what the Palestinians want. We want to live.”

She told me that her father, born in 1936, survived the 1948 Nakba — the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland after the creation of Israel — and talks nonstop about past trauma and dispossession. The backyard of Jacir’s home in Bethlehem is filled with Israeli weapons grenades, tear gas and bullets, all labeled “Made in the USA.” “There is no rest for any generation of Palestinians,” she told me. “It never stops. Time flies, and yet we are not going anywhere.”

Palestine 36 is sealed with bold determination. From the beginning, she was determined to film in Palestine, but production stopped days before filming was scheduled to begin, following the October 7 attacks. The foreign team was evacuated and it took hours for the Palestinian crew members to return to their homes amid a complete lockdown. Forced to move to Jordan for 13 months, they were later able to return, but found one site – an entire village they had painstakingly restored, including growing tobacco and cotton – had been overrun by settlers. There was also a risk of actors being misidentified if they were seen wearing military or rebel uniforms. “It’s a very tense situation, and it’s impossible to put anyone’s life in danger,” she says.

Over the course of two years, production stopped and started four times. The financial hit was enormous. As the situation worsened, producers suggested filming in Cyprus, Greece or Malta instead, but for Jacir it was worth the fight to film in Palestine. “It’s very important that Jerusalem is Jerusalem in the film. It’s not somewhere else. These places are real, they exist,” she says. “We feel like all of this could be taken away, it has been taken away.”

While filming in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian director realized that this might be the last time they would be there, just as she was aware of her own privilege in being on a land to which many could not return. The work became more critical because it was the only feature film filmed in Palestine in the past two years. I wonder: Did filming so close to the ongoing Israeli aggression on Gaza change her relationship with the art of filmmaking? “Technically, the project changed. I couldn’t help but react to that.”

While the film is large in historical scope, covering the three-year Arab Revolt, what we are left with is an emotional story of ordinary people struggling to get by. We find characters at a turning point, each life subtly intertwined like embroidery – a hand embroidery essential to Palestinian culture, which was at the forefront of Jacir’s concerns in the writing process. Each character was a thread that crossed and intertwined, ultimately leaving us with an image of resistance in the face of imperialism.

This is also evident in the film’s casting, with its mix of actors, from its animated hero, first-time feature film actor Karim Daoud Enaya, to Succession’s Hiyam Abbass and Game of Thrones’ Liam Cunningham, and in its use of color archival footage. Jacir wanted the film to “feel alive,” and says it was important to mix fantasy and reality. The footage also took on greater meaning after certain locations became inaccessible as the war worsened.

We watch history unfold in the agricultural village of Al-Basma – a fictional place modeled on the villages of Lifta and Al-Bassa – and bustling Jerusalem. As the number of Jewish immigrants fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe rises, so do Palestinian fears about losing territory under British mandate. What follows is a farmer-led revolution that mobilizes Palestinians of all classes. The British respond with martial law and the deployment of thousands of troops. Palestinians are imprisoned and executed, leaders are exiled and homes are burned.

In one scene, a young girl, Afra (Wardi Ailbouni, in her first appearance on screen), finds a gun hidden in the folds of a blanket near her sleeping grandmother, who caught her in the middle of acting. She told the girl that she would teach her how to use it, “but you must know that you have something stronger than the entire British Empire.” Afraa is confused: What is it? Her grandmother takes her hand. “You will find out for yourself,” she said to Afra wisely. In another scene, we see Karim (another first appearance for Sweet Rose) being asked to bite his father’s finger, while his father does the same to one of Karim’s fingers. Karim winces in pain. “I won. Do you know why?” asks his father. “Because I’ve endured longer, not because I’m stronger. You have to endure so you can win in the end.”

The two scenes are linked by their feelings of hope, something Jacir says is important to hold onto. But in response to the ongoing devastation in Gaza, it reined in the lighter moments. Suddenly, being funny, smart, or cultured was wrong. She says: “This is not the time for lightness. It is not the time for poetry. It is not the time for abstraction and experimentation.”

As is the case with the Palestine 36 characters, we do not know what will happen next. At the end of the film, we see Afra running through Jerusalem, wearing a tetriz dress, towards an unknown future. No one knows where it is headed, or what is happening, but as news emerges of a fragile ceasefire, Jacir’s message of resilience seems urgent rather than historical. “It’s just about keeping going,” she says.

Palestine 36 will be shown in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 2018 October 31.