Palestine Review 36 – an emotional epic set during the Arab Revolt against British colonial rule | film

ANamari Jacir’s film about the Arab anti-colonial uprising of the late 1930s arrives in the UK at a time when the British government has announced its recognition of a Palestinian state. It is a film that can be compared to Michael Winterbottom’s Shoshanna and Shirin Daibes’ All That’s Left of You, two dramas that reopen the fraught issue of British colonial history in Palestine.

It’s a poignant film, if somewhat flat-paced and conveyed in a pedagogical manner at times. The cast includes heavyweight Palestinian actors such as Hiam Abbas and Saleh Bakri as ardent rebels. Jeremy Irons plays High Commissioner Sir Arthur Wauchope who complacently presides over this troubling possession. The other colonists are divided, in traditional fashion, into “good Brits” – Billy Howle as a troubled, ineffectively pro-Arab civil servant – and “bad Brits” – Robert Aramayo as the brutal Captain Orde Wingate, who here embodies the arrogance and cruelty of the coloniser, shooting civilians in cold blood and ordering collective punishment of entire villages.

Jacir coldly links her dialogue to echoes of the future: Wingate strongly professes his belief in the region’s Zionist future and tells one skeptic: “Maybe you should think about which side of history you want to be on.” There is another complex echo when a Palestinian worker says: “They are replacing us with Jewish labor!”

There’s a large cast of characters, with the film’s emotional content carefully spread across them all, though the heart of the story is Youssef (Karim Daoud Enaya), a village boy who takes a job in Jerusalem with the editor of a secular, centrist, liberal newspaper who’s not averse to reconciling with Zionism. Youssef is not particularly political, but he is inevitably radicalized by the brutal British. None of these characters spark with enthusiasm for life, but they are all convincingly portrayed, a powerful reminder of what is not taught in British schools.