This guest post is written by Siddhant Adlakha.
Now in cinemas, Annemarie Jacir’s “Palestine 36” traces the 1936 Arab revolt against British rule — a period seldom dramatized on screen. Palestine’s official entry to the 98th Academy Awards, it unfolds on the scale of a mid-20th century Hollywood epic while subverting some of its expected imagery, offering a necessary shift in the default cinematic point of view. Although it takes about two thirds of its runtime to become emotionally engaging, the languid buildup is largely worth the wait, and yields an ensemble piece that fills a narrative gap in contemporary colonial discourse, about the moments leading up to the creation of modern Israel.
Beginning with real (albeit uncannily colorized) stock footage from the era, the movie is brimming with rich, period-appropriate details, luring us in through newly-captured shots of arriving steam trains. Our guide to this story is the young, optimistic Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), who travels from the bustle of Jerusalem for his chauffeur job back to his quaint countryside village in Nablus. The landscape’s natural beauty is broken up by British checkpoints, where white officers demand identification from ethnic Arabs — Muslim and Christian alike.
The movie, curiously, orients us in time by using a direct address via on-screen text. Rather than noting the year in its lower thirds (which should be evident from the title), it simply reads: “The year you were born.” By framing its tale of brewing revolt as a love letter of sorts, Jacir makes her forthcoming tale feel intimate, as though she were personifying the revolution itself, and positioning the audience as a vital part of it.
The story is deeply concerned with the nature of information, and the power of how it’s conveyed. Not only does it feature numerous newspaper clippings and radio broadcasts as connective tissue between scenes, it also quickly introduces Yusuf’s upper-class, metropolitan boss Amir Atef (Dhafer L’Abidine), a wealthy newspaper magnate in the good graces of the British, and his Oxford-educated wife Khuloud Atef (Yasime Al Massri), who publishes pro-Arab op eds under a male pseudonym, in response colonial powers ceding Palestinian land to refugees in the name of Zionism.
The sprawling cast of characters proves occasionally too weighty for the film to gracefully balance, but they each individually flesh out intriguing contours of history. The debuting Yafa Bakri plays the widowed mother Rabab, the object of Yusuf’s affections and a resilient centerpiece who provides food and shelter to farmers-turned-rebels.
Other Palestinian villagers are played by dramatic heavy-hitters like Volpi Cup winner Kamel El Bashaand and “Succession” star Hiam Abbass, who draw sympathy through their suffering at the hands of colonial officers. Meanwhile, various British perspectives are embodied by the likes of Jeremy Irons as the bureaucratic High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope, Robert Aramayo as the vicious, scraggly Captain Orde Wingate, and Billy Howle as the friendly liaison Thomas Hopkins, an ally to the Atefs.
Fleshing out the impeccable ensemble is Saleh Bakri as Khalid, a meek dock worker quickly radicalized into anti-colonial rebellion by the growing financial inequities. Through Khalid’s point of view, we observe the newly-minted British regulations that create vast inequities between Palestinians and arriving settlers. Bakri is enrapturing as always—in films like “All That’s Left of You” and “The Teacher,” his eyes are practically windows into difficult periods of Palestinian history—though he can’t help but feel underserved by the film’s mechanical unspooling.
For the first eighty-odd minutes of its two hour runtime, “Palestine 36” is told through a largely factual, observational outlining as it covers several months at a time, skipping what ought to be its most stirring developments, like Yusuf and Khalid’s active decisions to shed their passivity and take up arms. That these important character developments happen in between the cuts is a disappointment.
However, that Jacir’s heroes take on forms long demonized by western filmmaking — they’re covert bandits operating from the shadows, clad in face coverings and keffiyeh — is an aesthetic subversion that proves symbolic enough until a certain, inevitable turn ramps up the intrigue through sweeping shots and montages of major historical events. Once the British decide to carve up Mandatory Palestine for good, the movie’s emotional accelerations, in its final act, become undeniably rousing.
The film may be set nearly a century ago, but its palpable end goal is to reframe history through an oft-ignored lens — something Jacir set out to do when production began in January 2023, several months before Israel and Palestine were thrust into the global spotlight after October 7th.
Modern history has been written by the victors, and that the film’s clandestine Arab rebels largely failed in their goal of self-determination allows Jacir a more wistful (and at times, abstract) approach to the bigger picture. Her story’s contemporary echoes are far more pressing than its traditional narrative trappings.
The protagonists being unable to achieve their goals is, in essence, re-fashioned into a meta-text about the nature of cinematic sensationalism as though “Palestine 36” were gesturing towards the story as it continues beyond the confines of the frame, urging modern viewers to carry forward its revolutionary spirit.
While its occasionally-stilted tale of colonial brutality is self-evident, it subtly asks its audience to question both the fraught relationship between history and information, as well as our default assumptions about what characters and people are framed empathetically, making it one of the more vital releases of 2026.
Image credit: “Palestine 36”
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