On the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Elhum Shakerifar writes on Annemarie Jacir’s fourth feature — a seamless and searing depiction of the Palestinian pushback against British colonial rule in 1936; a necessary history lesson for our times, a reckoning.
Mandatory Palestine, 1936. Annemarie Jacir's sweeping historical drama opens with the inauguration of the first radio tower in Jerusalem. Flanked by an Arab and a Jewish representative, High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope (played by a suitably stuffy Jeremy Irons) announces that the broadcasts will be concerned with "the spread of knowledge and culture" rather than politics. The camera glides over an assembly of British diplomats and Palestinian aristocracy to settle on elegant newspaper editor Khuloud Atef (Yasmine Al Massri, in one of her most satisfying roles to date) as she leans over to her husband Amir to wryly reflect that "this is the part where they educate and elevate us"—a comment that echoes painfully into the present, given the role that Western media has played in the erasure of Palestinian culture and people for decades.
As Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya in his screen debut), the couple's driver, arrives back in his village, Al Basma (a fictional place based on the villages of Lifta and Al-Bassa), these words take on a more tangible reality. Yusuf's father admonishes him for spending time in the city when he is needed on the land, where clashes with settlers are increasing. Rising numbers of Jewish immigrants from Europe are arriving in Palestine; tensions rise inevitably as the new arrivals receive higher pay and rights in factory jobs, and are enabled by the British to take parcels of Palestinian land by law and by force. Young Afra (Wardi Eilabouni, also acting for the first time) balances along the curve of an oil pipeline, following her mother Rabab (Yafa Bakri) back from the wheat harvest when they come across a patch of enclosed land that is being built on by newly arrived settlers. As is often the case in Jacir's films, children ask the salient questions: "why are there fences around the colony? And why do they come to live here?" she asks her mother. "Their countries don't want them," Rabab answers simply.
Afra beams as her path intersects with Yusuf and he produces a bounty of stamps for her from his waistcoat pocket. She later spreads them out to reveal that the same British monarch rules lands from Palestine to South Africa, via Egypt, the Bahamas, Nigeria, Gibraltar and Sierra Leone, illustrating, in Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani's words, how "imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. *"
In the epilogue of Hazem Jamjoun's timely new translation of Kanafani's seminal text The Revolution Of 1936–1939 In Palestine: Background, Details, And Analysis, Maher al-Charif reflects that "Kanafani paid great attention to the great Revolution of 1936–1939 and presented this pioneering and comprehensive study because he recognized that it was the defeat of that revolution that paved the way for the occurrence of the Palestinian Nakba in 1948." While the past 26 months of the live-streamed genocide in Gaza should have been a devastating primer to anyone who hadn't previously questioned how a settler colonial apartheid regime can also be hailed as the only democracy in the Middle East, Jacir's dignified and potent depiction of the Palestinian pushback against British colonial rule in 1936 Mandatory Palestine is a sharp history lesson that should underpin everyone's understanding of today's disastrous present. As she told The Guardian, “a lot of people don’t even know, surprisingly, that the British were even in Palestine. *”
Drawing on Kanafani's analysis alongside a wealth of wider sources, Palestine 36 entwines the stories of Palestinian workers, peasants and intellectuals to re-centre this conveniently under-represented period of history: the largest and longest uprising against British colonial rule anywhere, at a time where Zionism was only beginning to take form on the ground, actively enabled by Britain's political and military blueprint.
Land and lineage have been central to all of Jacir's celebrated films, which alternate present/past settings: from her 2003 debut short Like Twenty Impossibles, in which a Palestinian film crew attempt to navigate Israeli checkpoints, to her first feature Salt of this Sea (2008) that sees Brooklyn-based Palestinian refugee Soraya (played by the Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad) return to Jaffa in attempt to reclaim her grandfather's assets, which were seized in 1948. In When I Saw You (2013) 11-year-old Tarek refuses to accept his family's displacement to Jordan during the 1967 Naksa and embarks on a journey home to Palestine on foot to find his father. 2017's charming Wajib sees Shadi (Saleh Bakri) return home to Nazareth for the first time in years to hand deliver his sister’s wedding invitations alongside his estranged father (Mohamed Bakri) as per the local tradition.
A decade in the making, Palestine 36 is Jacir's fourth and most ambitious feature to date. Alongside a deftly directed cast of actors from all parts of Palestine and the diaspora, archival images too are woven into the film, colourised as if to evoke the shimmering possibility of a reframed narrative. Some of the earliest moving images ever made were filmed in Palestine, serving the erasure project that enabled the fallacy that Palestine was a "land with no people". Like many colonial archives, Palestinian archives are deliberately made challenging to locate—dispersed, divided, often hiding mislabeled in museums and other national archives (as reflected in Mohanad Yaqubi's 2014 film Off Frame a.k.a. Revolution Until Victory, for instance) as well as purposefully looted and destroyed by the Zionist entity (the most significant historical example of this being the looting of the PLO's headquarters in Lebanon in 1982; more recently, the destruction of all universities and targeting of journalists in Gaza should provide ample evidence on an ongoing and active practice of erasure).
A slant aspect of the film's reclaiming of Palestinian history is that many of the film's figures are in fact real historical British officers—alongside Wauchope, we see for instance, Charles Tegart (played by Game of Thrones star Liam Cunningham) who served both in India and Palestine, and chillingly callous Orde Wingate (Robert Aramayo) who has been called the father of the Israel Defence Forces. On the other hand, the fictional character of Khuloud, a passionate nationalist who is obliged to write under the male pseudonym Ahmad Canaani, recentres womens' s political agency at the same time as reminding that histories long written by men are inevitably limited.
The film also speaks into the heartbreak of the present, most powerfully through young Afra. Emerging from a nightmare into a hushed conversation between her mother and grandparents, Afra's curiosity is piqued as she notices her mother hiding something in the folds of the mattresses piled in the corner of the room. Later, her sleeping grandmother Hanan (played by a luminous Hiam Abbas)—a symbol of steadfastness and defiance in the film—wakes and observes quietly as Afra comes back to investigate, telling the girl, as she discovers a striking antique gun: "I can show you how to use that. It's easy. But you have something more powerful than the entire British Empire."
Seldom has the British empire's violent world shaping architecture been depicted with such astute precision and clarity, giving this film the potential to change how the world is understood for generations to come. The tremor of the archive, almost tentative in its reclaiming, is also echoed by Afra, whose image draws the film to a close. Afra, whose name means "earth-coloured" in Arabic, but also refers to a time when the moon appears bright, like clarity. Tentative, like a little girl running barefoot through unfamiliar cobbled streets, holding close the knowledge that—as her grandmother once told her—she comes from a long line of brave people who love this land.
Elhum Shakerifar
* P3: Louis Brehony, “Ghassan Kanafani: Voice of Palestine (1936-1972),” Palestine Chronicle (blog), September 4, 2017
* P4: Geneva Abdul, "We don't want a state, we just want to live.", Guardian, Fri 17 Oct 2025
Elhum Shakerifar is a BAFTA-nominated producer, curator, poet and translator, and the founder of the London-based company Hakawati (“storyteller” in Arabic).
Following remarkable audience demand and repeated sold-out screenings, Palestine 36 continues its run across the UK and Ireland. Tickets available here. This essay was co-commissioned by Girls on Tops and Reclaim The Frame.