Palestine 36

Snapshot

Palestine 36 is Palestinian writer-director Annemarie Jacir's fourth narrative feature, a period drama set during the opening months of the Great Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 against British Mandate rule. Structured around Yusuf Bassawi (Karim Daoud Anaya), a young man who moves between his rural village and the ferment of Jerusalem, the film widens from an intimate coming-of-age story into a panoramic account of an insurgency and its colonial suppression. It is one of the most ambitious productions ever mounted under a Palestinian banner: a multi-country co-production carrying an ensemble that pairs established Palestinian actors — Hiam Abbass, Saleh Bakri, Kamel El Basha, Yasmine Al Massri — with British and Irish performers including Jeremy Irons, Liam Cunningham, Robert Aramayo and Billy Howle. The film premiered as a Gala Presentation at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival on 5 September 2025 (widely reported as the first Arab film to screen in that section), was selected as Palestine's submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film for the 98th ceremony, and advanced to the December shortlist. It runs roughly 120 minutes in Arabic and English.

Industry & production

The film was produced by Ossama Bawardi through Philistine Films, Jacir's long-standing production home, and assembled as a large international co-production spanning Palestine, the United Kingdom, France, Denmark, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, with companies including Autonomous, Corniche Media, MK Productions (mk2's production arm), Snowglobe and Metafora Production attached. This financing architecture — pooling European art-house money, Gulf funds and British participation — is characteristic of how films of Palestinian authorship reach epic scale, since no domestic industry infrastructure exists to underwrite a production of this size.

The most consequential production fact is contextual: principal photography was postponed following the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023, then resumed, and the film has been repeatedly described as the only feature shot inside Palestine across the two years that followed. Working in the occupied territories under those conditions is itself a defining constraint of the project rather than a neutral logistical detail. The reported box-office figure is modest (on the order of $2 million), consistent with a specialty-distribution release: Watermelon Pictures took North America, Curzon released in the UK (from 31 October 2025), Haut et Court in France (January 2026), and MAD Distribution across the Middle East. In January 2026, a screening in East Jerusalem was disrupted when Israeli authorities detained a projectionist and moved to ban the film locally, alleging it promoted proscribed organizations — a claim the producers disputed and Jacir appealed. That episode belongs to the film's distribution history as much as its politics.

Technology

Detailed capture specifications — camera systems, lenses, aspect ratio — are not well documented in the public record for this release, and I will not invent them; a 2025 production of this profile would almost certainly have been shot digitally, but the specific format is not something the available sources establish. The technological signature that is documented, and that reviewers single out, is the integration of restored and colorized archival footage from the Mandate period into the fabric of the fiction. This is a post-production and image-processing achievement as much as an aesthetic one: matching grain, palette and motion between period actuality footage and newly staged material so that the seams do not show. Critics noted the archival passages "enrich the movie's sense of place," suggesting the grading and restoration pipeline was tuned to let documentary and drama share a single visual register rather than sit in quotation marks against each other.

Technique

Cinematography

The camerawork is credited to three cinematographers — Hélène Louvart, Sarah Blum and Tim Fleming — an unusual division of labour that likely reflects the film's staggered, condition-dependent shoot. The presence of Louvart, one of contemporary art cinema's most sought-after directors of photography (The Lost Daughter, La Chimera, Petite Maman, Never Rarely Sometimes Always), and Fleming, an Irish DP experienced with historical and insurgency subjects ('71, Once), signals the level of craft brought to bear. Reviewers consistently praised the results, emphasizing landscape: "the natural world is a potent element, the land's beauty and its hiding places well captured." That phrasing points to a cinematography doing thematic work — the terrain read simultaneously as pastoral homeland and as guerrilla cover, the olive groves and hills that the revolt depended on.

Editing

Tania Reddin edited the film. The central editorial task is the one flagged above: weaving colorized archival material into a staged narrative without rupturing continuity, and managing a structure that expands from a single protagonist's vantage to a many-stranded historical canvas. Several critics registered this as a double-edged achievement — the panoramic ambition is legible, but the pacing drew comment, with The Guardian calling the film "rather stolidly paced and sometimes pedagogically conveyed." That is, in part, an editorial and structural verdict: the movie carries a large amount of exposition about a period unfamiliar to many viewers.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Production designer Nael Kanj and costume designer Hamada Atallah were praised for building "a vibrant world that's alive with period detail." The staging operates on two contrasted registers Jacir has favoured across her career: the textured intimacy of village life and domestic interiors, and the more formal, chilly geometry of British colonial administration — the recurrent image, noted by reviewers, of British officials seated around a table planning counterinsurgency. That spatial opposition (kitchen and field versus map and conference table) is the film's principal staging idea.

Sound

The score is by Ben Frost, the Australian-born, Iceland-based composer and experimental musician known for tactile, texture-forward work in film and television. His involvement suggests a soundtrack oriented toward atmosphere and unease rather than conventional period orchestration, though the sources do not describe the sound design in granular detail, so I will not overstate its specifics.

Performance

Performance is where the reviews are most united in approval. Saleh Bakri, as the worker-turned-revolutionary Khalid, was credited with conveying "innocence and awakening eloquently"; Yasmine Al Massri, as the upper-class journalist Khuloud, with bringing "fierceness and humor." Among the British contingent, Jeremy Irons's High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope was singled out — his "tireless stream of cigarettes" and a memorable set-piece speech — and Billy Howle drew strong notices. Not every performance persuaded: Robert Aramayo's Orde Wingate was described by Variety as "caricatured," a reminder that the film's British-officer roles sit close to the edge of villainy. Hiam Abbass and Kamel El Basha anchor the ensemble with the gravity they bring to any Palestinian production.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film's dramatic mode is the historical epic filtered through a bildungsroman: Yusuf is the youthful witness-figure whose passage from countryside to city, and from bystander to participant, gives the audience a way into a sprawling political event. Around him the narrative fans out into an ensemble mosaic — the revolutionary, the journalist, the priest, the matriarch, the British commissioner and his security apparatus — so that the 1936 general strike and armed revolt are dramatized from multiple social vantages rather than a single hero's arc. This is a recognizable strategy for national-historical cinema, and it carries the recognizable risk critics named: the individual coming-of-age line can be pulled taut against the obligation to explain the history, producing passages that feel expository. The interpolation of archival footage reinforces a chronicle mode, positioning the fiction as reconstruction of a documented past.

Genre & cycle

Palestine 36 sits at the intersection of the historical war drama and the anticolonial epic. Its clearest generic lineage is the cinema of decolonization — films that stage an indigenous population's revolt against an imperial administration — and reviewers reached instinctively for comparison and contrast with Hollywood's own Mandate-era touchstone, Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960), against which Palestine 36 was said to offer "far more facets and nuances" in its portrait of Palestinians. Within Palestinian cinema it belongs to a small cycle of period reconstructions of the pre-1948 and Nakba eras, a body of work that has historically been dwarfed by contemporary-set films because of budget. Its scale — international cast, multi-country financing, epic runtime — marks it as an attempt to bring Palestinian history into the register of the prestige historical epic.

Authorship & method

Annemarie Jacir (b. Bethlehem, 1974) is among the most established Palestinian filmmakers of her generation and, with Salt of This Sea (2008), became widely cited as the first Palestinian woman to direct a feature; that film premiered in Cannes' Un Certain Regard. When I Saw You (2012) played Berlin, and Wajib (2017) premiered in Locarno and was Palestine's Oscar submission — meaning Palestine 36 is at least the second time her work has carried that national standard. A poet as well as a director, and a founder of the Dreams of a Nation cinema initiative, Jacir has built a body of work preoccupied with return, exile, land and the transmission of memory between generations. Palestine 36 is both continuous with those themes and a marked scaling-up: her earlier features were intimate, small-cast chamber pieces, where this is a crowded historical canvas.

Her key collaborators reflect that ambition. Producer Ossama Bawardi and Philistine Films are her consistent production base. The three-DP camera team — Hélène Louvart, Sarah Blum, Tim Fleming — brings unusually decorated art-house and historical-cinema credentials to a Palestinian production. Editor Tania Reddin shaped the archival-fiction weave, and composer Ben Frost supplies a texturally distinctive score. Jacir wrote as well as directed, so the screenplay's structure — witness protagonist opening onto ensemble history — is authorial rather than adapted.

Movement / national cinema

The film is a central document of contemporary Palestinian national cinema, a body of work that operates without a domestic studio system and therefore depends on international co-production and festival circulation. Jacir's career is itself part of that cinema's institutional history, from Salt of This Sea onward. Within the wider frame of Arab cinema, the film's TIFF Gala berth was reported as a first for an Arab title in that slot — a marker of the movement's rising visibility. Palestine 36 extends the tradition of Palestinian filmmakers (Michel Khleifi, Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad, Jacir herself) using cinema as an instrument of historical counter-narration, here reaching for the largest historical canvas the tradition has attempted.

Era / period

The film reconstructs the outbreak of the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Mandatory Palestine: the six-month general strike, the armed rural insurgency, and Britain's counterinsurgency response. Its supporting cast is populated by recognizable historical figures — High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope (Irons), the security official Charles Tegart (Cunningham), whose name is attached to the fortified "Tegart forts," and Orde Wingate (Aramayo), architect of the Special Night Squads. This is the period that produced the 1937 Peel Commission's first partition proposal, and the film situates the revolt against the backdrop of rising Jewish immigration from a Europe turning murderous toward its Jews — a historical simultaneity the film has been both praised and criticized for handling. Some critics argued it oversimplifies toward "colonial cruelty versus Arab resistance" and underrepresents both Jewish communities and the revolt's own leadership, notably the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini; that debate is part of the film's historiographic reception and is worth naming plainly rather than smoothing over.

Themes

The governing themes are colonial power and the birth of an occupation; land as both livelihood and battleground; the awakening of political consciousness in a young protagonist; and the collision of communities under an imperial administration that plays populations against one another. Jacir's recurring preoccupations — belonging, exile, memory, the moral weight of the land — are all present, now placed at the historical origin point of the modern conflict. The film's insistence on dramatizing 1936 carries obvious contemporary resonance, and critics repeatedly read it as speaking to the present through the past; the "we don't want another Ireland on our hands" line quoted in reviews underscores the film's interest in the mechanics and rhetoric of colonial counterinsurgency.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception was strongly positive overall. The film held a very high Rotten Tomatoes score (reported at 98% across more than fifty critics, with a roughly 7/10 average) and a "generally favorable" Metacritic figure around 67 — a spread that captures near-unanimous approval of craft alongside more measured individual verdicts. The Hollywood Reporter called it "vivid and stirring" and praised its nuance relative to Exodus; The Guardian awarded three stars while noting stolid pacing and a pedagogical streak; Variety admired the ensemble but flagged Aramayo's Wingate as caricatured. On the festival circuit it accumulated significant honours, reportedly including Best Film at the Tokyo International Film Festival, the São Paulo audience award, and a special jury prize at the Asian World Film Festival, after a TIFF premiere that drew a lengthy standing ovation and a European bow at the BFI London Film Festival.

The influences on the film are legible: Jacir's own intimate body of work, the anticolonial-epic tradition, and the archival-reconstruction impulse of documentary-inflected historical cinema. Its forward legacy cannot yet be assessed — the film is only months into release as of this writing, and any claim about what it will shape would be speculation. What can be said is that its scale and international reach represent an argument for Palestinian history as material for the prestige epic, and that its Oscar shortlisting and the attempt to ban it in Jerusalem have already made it a reference point in the cultural politics surrounding Palestinian cinema. Whether it becomes a durable canonical work will depend on a reception history that is still being written.