The film was Palestine’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards (2026) and has screened at major global platforms, including the Toronto International Film Festival, the BFI London Film Festival, the Red Sea International Film Festival, and the Carthage Film Festival.
A particularly notable stop was its participation in the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where the festival spotlighted the film within its Limelight section, a curated programme dedicated to high-profile, award-winning, or critically acclaimed films that have already made a strong impact on the international festival scene and are being re-presented to wider audiences.
Palestine 36 further deepens Jacir’s ongoing exploration of memory, identity, exile, and belonging, themes that have shaped her work from early shorts and documentaries to her acclaimed features Salt of This Sea (2008) and When I Saw You (2012).
In this film, she once again navigates the space between the intimate and the historical, crafting a narrative in which personal stories resonate within a wider collective experience. Through this approach, Jacir reconstructs fragments of Palestinian history in a way that not only revives the past but also opens up a deeper conversation about history, representation, and the power of storytelling.
In this feature, the filmmaker takes us back to the landscapes and rhythms of Palestine in the 1930s, reconstructing the vibrant village life that was gradually erased under colonial rule.
Through an intimate yet politically charged narrative, the film revisits a pivotal historical moment that preceded the Nakba, tracing the roots of catastrophe to the period of the British Mandate and its decisive role in laying the foundations of occupation.
“This film is not about major historical events,” Jacir tells Ahram Online. “It’s about the people, about simple things and human connections.”
Drawing extensively on British archival material, Jacir reconstructs the events leading to the Palestinian Revolt of 1936, including what was then the longest general strike in modern history.
Combining restored and colourized archival footage with carefully staged re-enactments, the film creates a layered narrative that moves fluidly between documented history and lived experience.
Rather than foregrounding political leaders or historical icons, Jacir centres the story on ordinary people, villagers, workers, journalists, clergy, and activists, as they navigate the violent realities of colonial rule.
She notes that while Palestinians often remember the 1936 revolt and general strike with pride, far less attention is paid to the trauma, massacres, and collective shock inflicted during that period, events that profoundly shaped everything that followed.
“The journey began more than ten years ago. I wanted to understand that period more deeply. Once I began researching, I realized how extraordinarily violent it was, and how profoundly the brutality of the British army affected Palestinians,” Jacir explained.
The film features no Israeli or Jewish characters, focusing instead on the British occupation and the methods of military repression employed against Palestinians during the 1930s, a period marked by the large-scale arrival of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, the establishment of settlements under British supervision and protection, and the violent dispossession of Palestinians from their land through force and intimidation.
Jacir argues that British colonial practices laid the groundwork for what would later become Israeli occupation policies. “It’s as if Britain laid down the blueprint,” she said. “Everything we see today, house demolitions, killings, torture, collective punishment, even the idea of separation walls, was already practised by the British.”
She points out that archival records even document the existence of a wall between Palestine and Lebanon during that period.
“Israel has followed this model almost literally, by the book. They were not even inventive in their occupational practices. The British established all of these mechanisms of repression. They devastated many parts of the world, but in Palestine, the brutality was especially severe,” she stated.
The outbreak of the war in Gaza in October 2023, just days before filming began, had a profound impact on the project. Jacir acknowledges that the script initially carried a softer tone, but the unfolding massacres made such restraint impossible.
The war forced the production to abandon original locations in Palestine and relocate much of the shoot to Jordan, where an entire village was rebuilt from scratch using traditional architectural methods and crops once common in 1930s Palestine.
“Recreating the village was emotionally overwhelming; it felt as though we were rebuilding a Palestine that exists now mostly in memory, while watching another version of it being destroyed in real time,” the filmmaker recalled.
Positioning Palestine 36 within a broader cinematic lineage that includes works like Yousry Nasrallah’s The Gate of Sun, Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains, and Darin Sallam’s Farha, Jacir sees her film as part of an ongoing effort to reclaim Palestinian historical narrative through cinema.
With Palestine 36, Annemarie Jacir offers not only a historical reconstruction but a cinematic act of resistance, one that insists on memory as a form of survival. “Today’s audiences know about the Nakba,” she said.
“But far fewer know what led up to it. These earlier moments matter. If we don’t tell these stories, they risk disappearing.”
For Jacir, revisiting this history is not merely an act of remembrance but an urgent necessity. She sees the Palestinian experience as a continuum of recurring violence and dispossession, in which past and present remain in constant dialogue.
“We need to talk about this now because our history keeps repeating itself,” she said. “From the Balfour Declaration to the Nakba to 1967, these events did not happen in isolation; they followed one another in an unbroken chain of repression, killings, uprisings, and wars. The same patterns continue today. In many ways, this film could be set in 1936 or in the present, because the parallels are impossible to ignore.”
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