History may be written in retrospect, but Annemarie Jacir has little interest in treating it as something safely contained in the past.
With Palestine 36, the acclaimed Palestinian writer-director behind Wajib and When I Saw You turns her attention to the Arab Revolt of the 1930s, crafting an intimate yet expansive portrait of ordinary people caught within a moment whose consequences would reverberate for generations. Moving between rural Palestine and Jerusalem through an ensemble of farmers, families, workers and revolutionaries, the film resists reducing history to a single perspective, instead presenting collective memory as something lived, inherited and continually fought for.
That philosophy would take on an unexpectedly painful resonance during production. Filming in Palestine was forced to shut down amid the current conflict, with Jacir and her team losing locations, sets, props and months of preparation before rebuilding portions of the production in Jordan. Rather than abandon the film, they became even more determined to finish it; Jacir ultimately came to see the process of making Palestine 36 as its own form of revolt.
Ahead of the film’s Australian theatrical release on August 27th, our Peter Gray spoke with Jacir about refusing nostalgia when depicting Palestine, the importance of collective storytelling, cinema as a defence against historical erasure, and why the continued ability of Palestinians to tell their own stories lead to one emphatic conclusion.
I wanted to ask you about your description of the film. You’ve said it’s a cyclical story, and there’s something haunting about making a film about people living through history without knowing where that history will lead, while you know what comes afterwards. When you’re writing these characters, how did you stop that knowledge of the future from overwhelming who they were in 1936?
Yeah, it’s a really great question because, of course, I wrote the film as I’m living today. It’s my second period film, because When I Saw You is also set in 1967, and we know that everything just gets worse, right?
So I was interested in that repetition. The more I researched, the more I understood what a repetition it is, depressingly so. And yet, you know, that’s why I chose to end with Afra. I didn’t want to end with this moment of the destruction of the village. And we’re shooting it, of course, while Gaza is being completely destroyed, and the West Bank, and there’s always this question of: how do you break out of it? How do you stop this cycle, like you asked? How do you stop that?
And I think you stop it by trying to understand the beginning of it and recognising that. I think you also stop it by talking about our history and preserving the memory. That is how you stop it, because these things continue by relying a lot on the world erasing the past, on not remembering things. And I think it is a resistance against erasure in that way.
I know you’ve said that you never conceived this film as something belonging to the past; that it was always current and alive. Did the meaning of that statement change for you over the course of making the film itself?
Yeah, I mean, it was always there. But when the genocide started, we had to make that decision, you know, because everything was telling us to shut down. Financially, it was a complete disaster. We lost our locations, we lost all our prep, we lost all the props, we lost everything we’d built.
So there was this question of, well, “Do we continue? How do we continue?” And I’m very lucky that my partners on the outside didn’t give up on us, because we, as Palestinians, were like, “Of course we continue,” because that’s all we ever do. There is no other choice except to continue, because the other choice is even darker.
So we continued. But I have to say, there was something very, very painful and then very strange about shooting scenes of violence when the actuality of the real violence around us had become so much worse. These are violent scenes involving the army in the film, but now it’s like that on steroids, right?
So, yeah, it was strange. And I think what it did for the whole team was make us understand how much more important it was to tell this story. There was a responsibility to do that. None of us had ever seen a Palestinian film set in the 1930s. We’ve never seen Palestine on screen in the ’30s, so we felt responsible for that, and also to honour our grandparents, our parents, to honour that history, to honour our martyrs.
But, for me, it’s also about how to be critical of ourselves. The film is for us, too. Where did we go wrong? I’m always asking that question. What happened? And I pick at it, even if it seems like dirty laundry sometimes. It’s dirty laundry, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that a great injustice was done.
As you said about the setting, you’ve described the structure as being like embroidery, with characters weaving in and out of each other’s lives. Why was an ensemble important to you rather than telling 1936 primarily through Yusuf’s experience? Was there something about this history that resisted having a single protagonist?
Yeah, absolutely. (That) was there from the beginning. It was always that ensemble, the story of many people during the revolt, many characters. I didn’t want to do the very traditional story of, “Here’s Yusef from beginning to end.” I think that’s sort of the way we’ve been trained to watch movies.
But actually, I think in our own society, in our own culture, we’re not that kind of storyteller. We are storytellers in a collective sense, and the film is very much about a collective. It’s about a mass, popular revolt, of course, but it’s also about the collective.
I think one thing that the British Army could not understand, and then decided to hit at, was, “How do we control these people?” They understood something: they care more about the collective than the individual. So you hit at the collective. You punish. That’s where the idea of collective punishment came about.
So, for me, it was something that came very naturally. I didn’t intellectualise it when I started writing the story. It was an ensemble story. Later, I thought about it more and understood it. Of course it’s going to be that, because that is who we are. We are the collective, and that is our strength and the beauty of it. And, of course, it’s a mass revolt. It’s a story about our biggest mass uprising of the time.
And extension of that, the land is very much another character in this film. I’m interested in the distinction between filming landscape as something beautiful and then filming it as something that carries memory and ownership and displacement. How did you want us to feel the land rather than simply admire it?
The land is the consistent character in the film. And that’s also why it was so devastating that we had to shut down, start again and move so many times, because I had scouted very specific areas that were about this specific land. There’s only a minority of Palestinians that are allowed to live there.
I think, in terms of shooting the land, filming the land, it’s something that I’ve always been very aware of as being more than just pretty pictures. I know the meaning of it. I know the meaning of it when I screen the film and Palestinian refugees watch it, and they talk obsessively about seeing Palestine. They’re never allowed to go there. They’re forbidden to go there. So they’re able to see Palestine and to see our lives, basically.
So it’s that, you know, but also filming it without being nostalgic, right? It’s a period piece, but I never want to be nostalgic. I can be romantic, and I romanticise a lot of things, but I’m less interested in being nostalgic and more interested in asking questions, because I think that’s how we get out of this and move forward.
I know you’ve said that the film came to you through images of lace curtains, burnt field, dock workers, the radio bringing unwanted news. Do you find an image sometimes gets closer to historical memory than exposition can?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that’s what’s so beautiful about poetry, too, because poetry does the same thing. How do you capture a feeling in as few words as possible? And I think an image does that.
I think that’s the challenge for filmmakers is to try to invoke things. And it’s tricky with a film about ’36 because, of course, there’s a lot of dialogue and there is a lot of talking in the film. But I think it’s about what’s not said, and how to find the translation of capturing this mood and this feeling throughout the film.
There’s a really beautiful contradiction in your description of the film as a moment filled simultaneously with fear and hope, when everything briefly seemed possible. Was it important that the audience experience the possibility of that moment rather than watching a film simply as a tragedy whose outcome we already know?
Yeah, for sure. I think maybe that’s also why the archive was so important, because this is the world of the characters. This is the world they live in, and I want the audience to watch that and experience that world.
It’s why I colourised the archive rather than putting it in black and white, because black and white would tell you, “This is something of the past. This is how it was.” There’s something sort of a little academic about that for me, like, “This is where we were.” Instead, we come in and out of the story. I think black and white would have really interfered with the audience simply being in a story about these people.
You began preparing one film and ultimately had to make it under circumstances nobody could have anticipated. Stopping production, relocating, rebuilding. Is there a point where you can no longer separate the story of making the film from the story that exists on screen?
Yeah, I mean, I keep saying we all became obsessed, right? I think we had to finish the film. We had to keep pushing and make it. I was very stubborn about certain things, and I had this core team where we were like, “We have to do this.” I don’t think we could separate the two. We were also so heartbroken about what was happening that making the film was a way to keep busy, to keep doing something that we felt would actually mean something. Because if we stopped, we would have been destroyed. We would have been on the floor.
There was definitely something in me that was just saying, “Keep going,” because if I stopped and really thought about what was happening, I think I would have been debilitated. The news, the reality, was really devastating. So we just had to keep going.
And then I started to feel that we were the revolt. It sounds a little bit crazy, but I started to think, well, this is what it’s like. I’ve got these actors, I’ve got this crew, and we’re all trying to make this film against all odds. Every day, something crazy was going wrong. Something was happening. We were losing things.
I had financiers, people who supported the revolt – they financed the revolt, right? I had great, great actors who were in just one scene or had a cameo. Everybody was doing whatever they could for the film. And that’s how a revolution works. Some people are doing a lot, some people are doing less. People are doing what they can, whether it’s financial, whether it’s physical, whatever they can contribute.
So I started to feel like the film, the making of the film, was the revolt.
When history has been disputed, reframed, and politically weaponised for generations, what responsibility do you think a filmmaker has that might be different from the responsibility of a historian?
I mean, yeah, I think the filmmaker has to be authentic. I think the film has to be authentic. But I can tell you 20 books that you should read if you’re really interested in the history, because I’m also telling a story, and it is a story.
This is not the story of the revolt. This is the story of a group of villagers during the revolt. They are fictional. There are some characters who are non-fictional, but I’m playing with them, right? I’m trying to create a truth within the film and within the story of this revolt.
But it’s so intimate. It’s a mother and her daughter, a grandmother and her granddaughter. They’re really small moments within a much bigger picture. And I think a historian will tell you much more than that, as they should.
You have spent so much of your career telling Palestinian stories, but I know that you’ve described this as your most ambitious and difficult film. What did Palestine 36 ask of you as an artist that your earlier films hadn’t?
Every film is a challenge, and every film that gets made, every piece of art that gets made, is somehow a miracle.
I do think this challenged me beyond anything I’ve known. The weight of it felt like you’re standing under a house and the whole thing is crumbling. You’re trying to put this wall back up, and then that side of the house falls, and then you’re running over there trying to put the window back in. It just felt like something was constantly crumbling on my head, and I was trying to keep it together.
And now it’s there. It’s there, right? We finished it. And it’s not what the architectural blueprint of that house was. It’s not what it was supposed to be, but it’s something else, and it bears the scars of the moment, for sure. Many things changed, so I think that was the challenge for me: constantly having something thrown at us and then dealing with it in a way I’d never known before. I mean, all cinema is like that, but this was something else for me.
And just before letting you go, and I want to thank you again so much for your time, I know that you’ve ended your director’s statement with, “Did we lose? Did Empire win?” After making this film, I’m curious whether you think cinema itself complicates that question because if people can still tell their own stories and preserve their memories and insist upon being seen, perhaps history hasn’t been allowed the final word?
Yeah, I do feel that. It’s funny, when we went to London for the premiere at the London Film Festival, a lot of the Palestinian crew and cast were there, and I thought, this is so crazy. Here we are, 130 years later, the British came to our country, and now here is a group of people, the grandchildren, coming back with this story of what happened and what the British Mandate meant for us, in its good and its bad.
Then we were taken to Parliament because we had a screening in the UK Parliament. Somebody organised it because they felt there was a whole educational side to the film, and they wanted British audiences to see it. We’re in this room in the UK Parliament, and there’s this huge portrait of Lord Peel on the wall and Balfour over here. And I thought, you know, this is incredible.
Yes, we continue, and we are sitting here speaking about the things that so many people couldn’t say, couldn’t speak about, weren’t allowed to speak about, or were silenced over. And we’re talking about it. So, yes, empire didn’t win. Empire didn’t win.
And also, in places like the UK, even the UK distributor wasn’t sure the film would be successful. They weren’t sure audiences would go because it’s very tough on the British. And yet, week after week, the cinemas were full. They were full of young people and people who wanted to know.
I’m sure some people were like, “This isn’t true,” or whatever, but I know the cinemas were full. It was way more successful than expected, and the kinds of discussions we had were with people saying, “We have to talk about our colonial past. It’s not going to be hidden under the rug.” And our colonial present.
I think audiences are changing, and that’s really the silver lining.
Palestine 36 is scheduled for release in Australian theatres from August 27th, 2026.
