In January of 2023, filmmaker Annemarie Jacir began pre-production for her movie “Palestine 36” – the crew was sewing costumes, restoring villages, and prepping a slew of locations across the county of Palestine that would serve as a backdrop for the period epic.
But, after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent military invasion of Gaza, the production was forced to shut down and relocate to Jordan. For Jacir, the experience of continuing to make the film – which eventually completed shooting in Palestine, but stopped and started four times in the process – was one of the hardest and most painful things she had ever done. But, the cast and crew kept pushing forward, determined to finish what would be an important document of Palestinian resistance against colonialism.
“Palestine 36” tells the story of the Arab revolt – a rebellion against British colonial rule that began in 1936 – in what was then Mandatory Palestine, an uprising that coincided with growing numbers of Jewish refugees coming to the region from Europe, fleeing antisemitism and persecution. The film brings together a myriad of characters, including Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), caught between his rural village and the excitement of Jerusalem; Khalid (Saleh Bakri), a laborer turned revolutionary; Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine) and Khuloud (Yasmine Al Massri), a wealthy husband and wife with different ideas about the uprising; and Thomas (Billy Howle), a good-hearted man who is part of the British machine and believes in the good of their rule.
“Palestine 36,” which opens in Atlanta at the Tara Theatre on April 3, effortlessly combines these perspectives to reach a devastating conclusion. Ahead of the release, I spoke with Jacir about the making of the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve been reading a lot of interviews with you, and something you talk about a lot is the blur of past and present, and making this film, looking at Palestine in the present day and looking at it then, and kind of wondering, where is the line? What has changed? Going off of that, when did you first start working on this idea, and what prompted you to want to tell a story about Palestine during that time?
Annemarie Jacir: It’s been an idea for a very long time, for me, and it’s because it’s such a critical moment in history, in our history, and one that I’ve never seen on screen before. It’s kind of present in popular culture, in music a lot – there are a lot of songs that I know, and it’s like, “This is from the revolt of ‘36.” It was a completely game-changing moment in our history.
So I think that was the beginning of wanting to try to explore it and understand more. Coming, also, from a background where both of my parents are from Bethlehem – talking about it, hearing about it, but not really understanding the depths of it, and the details of it until I delved in. There’s so much work, academic work, that’s been done about it, but not very much – nothing at all, really – in cinema.
It’s interesting that it shows up in music, this one particular art form, but not cinema. Do you have any sort of concept of why it wasn’t something that was explored cinematically before?
Jacir: Yeah, it is interesting. I mean, the thing is that those songs carry on, and it’s part of oral history. Oral history is important, and so those songs are still sung today. And maybe people can’t always tell you where they come from. We know that they’re folkloric songs, and they’re about revolution, and then every few years they’re sort of redone, or revived, or whatever. But I think, really, that’s the main reason. And cinema is – I mean, to make such a film, you need resources. We don’t have support, and doing any kind of period film is – you know, the costs are definitely more, and to do something at this level needs a lot of support. It’s why we took so much time to be able to get there.
Yeah, it’s been interesting hearing you talk about the intense collaborative effort – building all of those villages to just the right period, getting the costumes right. Stuff like that always reminds me how much of a collaborative effort film really is, to make sure everything’s perfect.
Jacir: Absolutely. It’s nothing if not collaborative. I feel so strongly in that collaborative effort, that if just one person is different on the team – one creative person is different – it changes the film somehow. I mean, I think everybody’s mark is on the film. You talk about directors and the director’s vision, of course, but everybody’s mark is on it, and I think you see that. Everybody who worked on the film, I see their mark on it. And if they were different crew and different people, there would be different marks.
I know you did a ton of research for this, and I’m curious, looking through all those books, archival sources, footage – which is present in the film – is there one particular book, or research moment, or memory about that process that stands out to you as particularly transformative? And if so, how did that manifest in the film itself?
Jacir: I mean, there were a lot of moments of surprise, or stuff like that. I would say – well, I’ll give you two moments. One is that the village in the film, where this incident takes place at the end of the film when the army enters the village, hearing about that first from a friend’s mother, and then reading and discovering that story – because I hadn’t heard it from anyone else. Discovering that in the research, and soldiers talking about going into the village, and they spend the whole day and night there putting villagers on a bus – all those things – somehow, in a naive way, I think I was surprised by that. Because I hadn’t heard of it. I knew the British were tough, but that was sort of the opening of that door of understanding how much really was going on, and how really violent it was.
It’s interesting to think about, because by the time you get to 1948 – you get to the Nakba – you’ve got to understand that you have a people now who have already endured a lot of death, a lot of pain, a lot of imprisonment. It’s already there. It’s not something that comes out of nowhere.
I can imagine, just like you said, it’s something different when you verify it from multiple sources. Then it becomes like, oh – this is true.
Jacir: I mean, it’s the most obvious thing, but it is a bizarre feeling. You know, you hear about it from somebody’s mother. You live very near that village. You never heard about it, but you hear somebody mention it, and then suddenly you find in academia, it mentioned in a book. And then you poke at it, and you research more, and then you find that even the soldiers who were involved talked about it. Yeah, it’s like everything that we do is somehow rooted in reality.
Speaking of that reality, I know this production was interrupted by Oct. 7. Making a film, I think, is intense and stressful enough when it’s not interrupted by war and global conflict. I can only imagine what that must have been like, and I wonder for you and the rest of the cast and crew, logistically and emotionally, what was the process like of picking back up and trying to keep it moving?
Jacir: Logistically, it’s funny, because I was talking to a producer yesterday about it. I was curious – you know, we went through a lot to make this happen, and I was resistant to move. I didn’t want to leave Palestine, and I just said that we’re going to shoot here. We’re going to film here. So I asked him yesterday, “Do you remember when we made the decision that we weren’t going to be able to shoot in some of the locations we had prepped, and we were going to have to shoot them in Jordan? Do you remember exactly that moment? Because I actually don’t remember that moment. I remember that I was very resistant.”
He said, “Yeah. It was just like, you refused. You kept refusing, you kept refusing. Months were going by, and I just” – the way he describes it – “I just cut the umbilical cord. I just cut it, and we had to deal with the situation.” I thought about it for a second, and I was like, “Actually, you didn’t cut it. It just got longer. That’s what happened.” [Laughs]
It was really hard, because we had prepped so much, and it’s so much detail, and then to start all of that from zero. I mean, just to talk about the location manager – she had to find 130 new locations from zero. The production designer had restored – we’d restored an entire village with the art department, and he had to start all over again from zero, including planting the crops, like, all of it. It was really devastating, and it was very painful. He was like me – we just wouldn’t let go, just like that umbilical cord. And then, we understood that we had to, because there was no way we were going to film otherwise. It was logistically very hard, also because even if we wanted to film here, part of the thing was that agents weren’t letting their actors come anymore to Palestine. There was no insurance anymore. There were really basic things, nothing was covered. It’s not a small film, so these are the logistical things.
I just remember we felt really like this horrible, horrible thing was happening, and every day was worse, and worse, and worse, and there was silence everywhere. You can almost forget about it, because now I feel like a lot of people know about what’s going on, and they talk about it. It’s somehow more out there. But at the time, it was very lonely.
I think that sort of seems to be the way of a lot of things. I mean, I was thinking about how – and I know you’ve worked a lot with Saleh Bakri, the actor – he’s someone I didn’t know very well, probably before a few years ago. Part of that is me expanding my own cinematic consumption, but also I feel like more films now have been crossing over from Palestine, and from that region of that world. So it feels like we’ve taken a bit of time to catch up not only what’s going on now, but the talent in that part of the world as well. He is absolutely magnetic in the film.
Jacir: Yeah, there’s so much talent. There’s amazing talent, and Saleh is one of them. It’s interesting for actors especially, because they have so few opportunities here too. Like, Saleh would be a huge star, if he were somewhere else in the world. But he’s here, and he wants to be here. You know, he makes a lot of compromises because he doesn’t want to be in things that he doesn’t like. Unless he’s like, really broke and he needs the money at that moment. [Laughs]
Makes sense! I mean, also there’s a lot of people making their acting debuts in this. I thought the actress who plays Afra was just wonderful, especially for a child. I wondered if you could talk about directing kids, and helping them to draw out these really intense performances. Because I thought the actor who played Kareem was also really, really great, and I can imagine it’s quite difficult within the context of something this violent and this intense.
Jacir: I really enjoy working with kids. Not my last feature, but the one before that – “When I Saw You” – the main actor was entirely this child, who was 11 years old at the time. And I really like working with kids, because it’s all about play and being open and convincing them to let their guard down and that they’re in a safe space, and there are no wrong or right reactions to things. You just have to just be in the moment. And I really love that.
These two, whose names are Ward [Helou] and Wardi [Eilabouni] – the boy is Ward and the girl is Wardi, they’re very similar names – but they’re incredible. To start with him, he really wants to be an actor. He knows now this is his path, and he’s very talented. I think he has a big future in front of him. She’s really an entertainer. She’s just this beautiful character. She’s very curious about the world. She’s childish, but she’s really confident. It’s one of the things I noticed about her. She’s very smart, and she’s very funny, and she has an amazing confidence. Both of them come from families that really support and love them. I think this is part of why they are so comfortable, that they were so great with acting, and so open.
I didn’t let them read the script. I kept the script away from them, but I talked to them about the story. I thought that if they read the script, they just would be too caught up in the details of things and information they didn’t need to know. Let’s just let them think about the things that they need to think about, which is their character and their story, and not everybody else’s story and everything that’s happening politically. They’re kids, after all, in the film, and they don’t need to know all of this. They are two characters who start off very innocent, and then understand what’s happening in the world.
He definitely has the hardest scene in the film, and that was a lot of prep. We talked about it a lot. I let him know that this was coming, and we talked about it on set, and I really took our time with it. And he was really nervous about – “I’m gonna mess up, I won’t know what to do.” But I told him, you just don’t do anything. Just be in the moment and imagine. I’m just setting the imagination for him, and letting him know there is no – you know, if we have to do it a million times, we’ll do it a million times. In reality, we can’t do it a million times. [Laughs]
But he doesn’t have to know that.
Jacir: And he did it in one take, too! I mean, that was the only take, when that moment happens, and it was like, “Oh my God. We got it!” He’s incredible.
Another thing I love about this movie is that it does live a little bit in the gray area. I think about the Amir character a lot, and there’s that revelation that his Muslim Association is being funded by the Zionist Commission. And then there’s the Thomas character, who at the outset of this, is not so bad, but I was struck by his line, “I quit Palestine.” Because that’s something he’s sort afforded the opportunity to do that not everyone else is. I wondered if you could talk about some of the historical aspects of that – I believe Thomas is based on someone real?
Jacir: Yeah, Thomas is based on a real character. He was a secretary for the High Commissioner, and he was very much like the Thomas in the film. He really believed in the good intentions of the British Mandate in Palestine – that it was helpful, it was going to organize things. He believed in the project of it, that it was going to be involved in education and agriculture, and all this stuff. As time went by, he realized that it was a colonial project about control. So he really gets disillusioned, and you feel that in his diaries. He did quit, and the real Thomas became a Marxist.
Wow.
Jacir: Yeah. So he doesn’t quit … entirely. He actually quits that job, and he becomes very involved in the world as an anti-colonial activist, and in Marxism. It changed his whole view of the world, and he was an incredible person.
But in the film, he quits, and we don’t see him again. You know, I live in Palestine. There are so many people who, they come here to help – you know, international organizations – and they want to help, but they can always leave, right? They can always just say, I’m done. It gets too difficult, it’s too hard, or it’s too ugly, or it’s too whatever, and they go. And some people never come back, or some people, it was just like a trend for a moment in their lives, and then it’s over. And so, yeah, I think I was pointing to that with that line.
I was also really struck by the editing style in this movie, and I thought it was very effective. There are a lot of abrupt cuts where we’re left reeling from a moment of violence, but not necessarily seeing the complete fallout. There’s a moment that really struck me when Yusuf is screaming after the fields are burning, and he’s yelling and trying to put it out. And then it cuts away very quickly, and everything is suddenly calm again. It left me feeling unsettled, and kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wondered if you could talk about creating that atmosphere with the edit.
Jacir: I worked with a great editor, Tania Reddin. She lives in London, and she’s Ghanian Irish. So she really understood, you know. We were very much connected from the beginning about colonialism, about being marginalized. This story was very personal for her, and we talked a lot about that.
I really don’t like to feel that I’m emotionally manipulating. I don’t like to dwell on things too long. That exact moment of the cut away from Yusuf, that yelling and that brokenness in his voice, and then just cutting and time just moves suddenly – times goes on. We talked a lot about time and how the edit can reflect that, and also not letting the audience relax into things. Let the audience wonder what happened, to feel a little, as you said, unsettled. It was part of it. It’s a very tricky thing to maneuver. It’s very tricky, because I don’t like to feel manipulated when I watch films. I’m a very easy audience, I’m very emotional when I watch things. But the minute I feel that I’m being made to feel in a certain way. I turn off. I don’t like it. I want to be left alone to come to my own feelings and conclusions. And I think for us, that was a lot about the style of the editing.
