There's origin stories, and then there's more origin stories in the beyond.
To know when a country came into being, where does one look? Which contentious social faction does one consult? Which land's unjust deeds does one examine? Two months ago in the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Palestinian American filmmaker Cherien Dabis ("Amreeka") told IndieWire that she thinks of her 2025 film "All That's Left of You" as the "Palestine origin story." A period drama tracing the fortunes of a middle class Jaffa family from 1948-2022, Dabis's film made huge leaps in time, covering the Nakba, the after-effects of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, and the First Intifada, but beyond neat Wikipedian chunks, Dabis traced history through the generational traumas and minor acts of love within one particular family.
In "Palestine 36," veteran Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir ("Wajib," "When I Saw You," "Ramy") goes back even further and deeper into the archive, the social tapestries, and colonizer tactics, to ask how Palestine as we know it today might have come to originate in the anti-British Palestinian Revolt of 1936-1939. Not one family but a sprawling ensemble cast of characters are deployed as foot soldiers in Jacir's narrativization of tiny spikes of shock and rebellion -- crosscut with immensely resonant, handsome archival images -- that characterized the "fellahin" (peasant)-led revolt's first two years. There are known names such as Hiam Abbas ("Succession," "Gaza mon amour"), Jacir regular Saleh Bakri ("The Blue Caftan"), and Jeremy Irons, alongside two striking actors in core roles making their screen debuts: Berlin-based theater actor Karim Daoud Anaya, and Yafa Bakri of the venerated Bakri clan who is also credited with performing one of the songs on the film's soulful soundtrack.
In fact, so sprawling is the cast that you wouldn't be faulted if you missed Hiam Abbas entirely. Her character is a peasant who, around the midway mark, gives an inspiring speech to her granddaughter, Afra (Wardi Eilabuni). Stirring on its own, but minute. It works if you are really paying attention to the pageturner storytelling and have the spatial intelligence to proactively connect plants to payoffs.
This brings up a key dilemma Jacir faces that she is unable to fully resolve. Not many in a modern non-Arab international audience will have heard of the period of the British Mandate, which saw large waves of Jewish immigration from Germany and Europe in the '30s, let alone the strike, the Peel Commission and its momentous recommendation, and the peasant revolt, roughly the three macro events explored here that flip the fates of characters we desperately want to spend time with more consistently.
Jacir is so passionate and determined to translate her "river of research," as she refers to it in the press notes, into a complex story of repeatedly hard-won identity and dignity in the face of varied oppressors, that she is less successful in communicating the history in digestible bits. Nor does she chart character arcs satisfactorily, which epic war dramas, Dabis's included, regularly accomplish. Possibly her purposes are grander? To provide severely needed sociohistorical context as the empathetic half of the partisan world spirals helplessly in face of the genocide in Gaza?
Perhaps she means to demonstrate how the beginnings of Zionist settler colonialism cannot be understood without comprehending the complicity of the fading British Empire's last hurrahs. Maybe Abbas, the Bakris, and Irons are trees we should miss for the forest. Palestine in 1936 and 1937 -- from landowners and press editors in Jerusalem, to farmers in mountain villages such Al-Basma, and laborers in the port of Jaffa -- had so many social factions simultaneously impacted, with people compromised by competing loyalties, that this origin story must be experienced as loose lattice-work, just as the actual resistance was.
Quilts also tell origin stories. A movie should also be allowed to move across its patchwork, each square a field on fire, each stitch a future orphan tightening on witnessing an explosion, each section proclaimed by an intertitle as though the final words of a martyr.
The first intertitle, dated March 1936, already feels like a doomed utterance: "The year you were born." Archival clips show thousands of Jews persecuted in Germany have begun migrating to Palestine. Yusuf (Anaya) finds himself straddling class differences. Hailing from the village of Al-Basma where his aging peasant father feels he is needed because neighboring villages are being confiscated, Yusuf has instead taken on a new job in Jerusalem as a driver for a rich, hip couple -- Amir, an influential newspaper editor, and Khuloud (Yasmine Al Massri, "Quantico"), his charismatic journalist wife who uses a male pseudonym to write her increasingly anti-empire missives.
The second intertitle goes, "Rebellion begins with breath." In the port of Jaffa, a laborer, Khalid (Saleh Bakri), is quickly radicalized after he is beaten when demanding overtime wages, already set lower than those paid to newly arrived Jewish workers. "Bread or bullets," he says, an unusual moment when the film pauses to benefit from an actor's stately presence. Even as liberal-seeming Amir invites Yusuf to join the Muslim Association, an informal organization of male Arab landowners, Yusuf's father is killed in a night-time confrontation with the settlers. Then his brother is arrested at the funeral. Yusuf too will soon join Khalid in the rebel group.
Intertitles continue: "Negotiations with friends," "Song of return." British characters make their oppressor moves (It's worth noting that other than a few background actors, there are no Jewish characters in the film; Jacir effectively posits that the British are doing the Zionist work). The Secretary to the High Commissioner (Billy Howle) has a moral dilemma written with nuance; the High Commissioner himself (a wasted Jeremy Irons) manipulates a group of female protesters by suggesting that Arabs have a history of compromise. The strike begins, the strike ends. The Peel Commission plays God with a testament about partition that reverberates shatteringly. Then around the time the revolt begins, the intertitles disappear. Jacir weaves in more salient archival imagery. Buoyed by the talents of the great Hélène Louvart ("Romería," "Beach Rats"), one of three cinematographers, and the excellent, easily overlooked work of costume designer Hamada Atallah, which surely gives new meaning to a cinema of embroidery, she portrays detentions, betrayals, and dynamite guerrilla warfare with the right degree of rend.
The rest as they is history. And history and storytelling are beasts of different pastures. For audiences to walk away with a firm grasp of this crucial chapter before the Nakba, "Palestine 36" would at least need to be a limited series. Anyhow, the film faced immense production challenges due to October 7, which jeopardized painstaking preproduction work in Palestine.
However, it's precisely because Jacir has woven cinema as quilt and polyphony that there will be some patches and some characters that an audience member will identify with strongly and others they'll walk away wondering about. I haven't even mentioned two pre-adolescent friends in Al-Basma village. What they witness in the movie's last half hour crosses lines they have known. One of them runs and keeps running. The thread, we know, runs to Gaza today.
"Palestine 36" premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.