TO FINISH WITH empire, we must first remember the truth of the violence that made it possible. British academic Paul Gilroy believed this, and that the loss of empire is the central social, political and cultural fact of British society today. But the more brutal realities of imperialism – the realities of violent deaths following occupation, emergency laws, judicial murders, the bloodshed accompanying deportation (horrors fundamental to the British state) – are rarely captured by filmmakers for a large, multiplex audience. 

There’s no doubt that cinema needs to set the record straight, or that it can. ‘Perhaps the most seductive of imperialism’s pleasures,’ writes scholar Colin MacCabe, is its need ‘to always be right, to be transported to a realm in which doubt is impossible’. Film can be run counter to this dangerous alternate realm: a brilliant, bracing reality check, forever ruining the claims of the West’s superiority. The war drama Palestine 36, the latest effort from longtime Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, achieves this. 

Set during the dying days of the British Mandate of Palestine, which began in 1918, Palestine 36 concerns a period of history that has escaped mythologisation and careful cinematic attention. Born of love and a heavy heart, this BFI- and BBC-supported co-production is the tale of a failed revolution and an origin story for today’s genocide of Gazans. It is March 1936, and the British are cracking down on Arab protests against their occupation. Jacir, warden of the Dreams of a Nation project (which preserves Palestinian cinema), is prudent to gesture to her homeland’s modernity in scenes shot across the West Bank and Jordan. Watching the jostling cars, railways and coolly tailored population of Jerusalem, we sense tradition, pluralism and history in perpetual motion – a crossroads. 

Written with novelist Selma Dabbagh, Jacir’s script takes pains to show a split sample of Arab society – the treacherous leadership of wealthy landowners, Oxford-educated journalists fighting for truth-telling, Palestinian Christians working the marketplace, Muslim farmers ploughing cotton fields in embroidered village dresses – all smarting in disbelief as the first major Zionist settlements arise. ‘Tensions are rising between us and the settlers,’ the viewer is told in on-the-nose dialogue. Illegal barrels of weapons are arriving through the ports in Jaffa, destined for these new walled-in kibbutzim. An Arab general strike swells. The leadership is demanding a democratic government. Eventually, ordinary Palestinian citizens erupt into open rebellion as British tactics grow evermore punitive. Ultimately, in the words of historian William Dalrymple, Britain walked away as Palestine burned.

Jacir’s primary formal tactic is to anoint Palestine’s anticolonial militia with the polish of a prestige drama. The genre’s playbook is recognisable: a period setting, an aspiration to epic proportions, the use of archival images that invite a sense of authenticity, a sprawling character ensemble to show the intimate intersections of a historical moment, a ponderous tone, capitulation to the widely accepted constructs of high-end production values, a strategy to enter awards season (the film is Palestine’s offering to the Oscars for the foreign film category) and an attempt to drive a cultural legacy. These are much the same war-drama markers of Natalie Portman’s A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015), in which an overlapping period – the British Mandate’s end – is seen from the perspective of the settlers. However, the subject matter of Palestine 36 is tougher territory, trickier than Jacir’s Jordan-set When I Saw You (2012), a delicate, child’s-eye portrait of a family in exile after the 1967 Six-Day War.

POLITICAL VIOLENCE IS one of today’s most fraught questions. My daily media intake is spiked with alluring artistic imaginings of an ongoing North American frontier war, hot Luigi’s memeworthy vigilantism and guilty plea, irrepressible non-state actors like Hamas, dozens of civil wars and the frightening gunshots at Bondi last year. In this flammable thematic zone, Jacir’s ambitions to seriously contemplate decolonisation efforts, unsanctioned violent action and martyrdom are cinematically thorny to position. She’s working in the flickering shadow of powerful work about honest defiance to oppression. I’ve seen films in which entire chapters of military history are relayed by philosophically minded soldiers on the back of combat vehicles under attack from independence guerrillas (Manoel de Oliveira’s No, or the Vain Glory of Command, 1990, Portugal). I’ve seen torture portrayed by non-professional actors with the same all-consuming force as scenes of tactical guerrilla operations at the height of the postcolonial era (Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers,1966, Algeria and Italy). I’ve seen campaign planning – and the rockiness of political theory put into practice – orchestrated in thrillingly intense, democratic, contentious weekly meetings (Robin Campillo’s BPM Beats Per Minute, France, 2017). Each of these films demonstrates the ways in which politics is a human practice. They are robustly and variously hot-blooded, relentless, intellectual, talky and action-based, at times switching to more intimate moments. As stories, they work to capture the texture of lived rebellions without making it feel like a hard sell. They achieve this through high-stakes, life-or-death storytelling.

Palestine 36 chooses an artistically safer option, finding a curious creative parallel with the ubiquitous Holocaust drama. And I’m not thinking here of deeply original films that depart from the mainstream of this genre, like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), which ironically juxtaposes the idyllic life of a Nazi administrator’s family with the merest suggestion, and sounds, of Auschwitz’s brutality. Instead, Palestine 36’s sweeping arcs, atmospheric dread and muted colour palettes share more commonality with last year’s Nuremberg (James Vanderbilt), in which typical themes like the banality of evil are explored via mawkish, familiar conventions.

Palestine 36’s script reduces radicalisation to a fire that ignites in a moment, in singular scenes of unconvincing self-revelation (a dock worker is bashed for asking for his overtime payment and promptly joins the underground Arab army). Most of the Arab characters become martyrs without deep enquiry into the nature of martyrdom in national struggles. Meanwhile, the logistical infrastructure of the counterinsurgency’s cells and operational design fall outside Jacir’s vision. And yet these are classic conventions of the guerilla film, a subgenre of squandered dreams – Steven Soderbergh’s 2000s-era Che couplet, a mazy exploration of fighting and tactics, even dared to show Guevara’s execution from the revolutionary’s own point of view as he falls to the squalid ground. 

Instead of similarly soldering radical form and politics, Palestine 36 looks to the figure of the British Army’s High Commissioner, played in just a few scenes by Jeremy Irons with deft irony and authority (Hiam Abbass’ steadfast Palestinian villager is just as frustratingly ephemeral and underwritten). What does Irons’ fleeting character say about the administrative class in a military state, and what one investigative documentary called the ‘British double dealing’ during and after the First World War? The educational short Britain and Palestine, 1917–1948 (2015) traces the ways in which Britain’s protectorate laid the basis for the ethnostate of Israel (thus permitting Zionist demands for land and resources while purporting to modernise the Arab majority) and the ruthless suppression of the 1936 revolt, with its hangings and house demolitions. In Palestine 36, Irons’ dialogue and the pitch of his performance point to the false promise of harmony, provided that the Arabs acquiesce to the decrees of civilised men. He is clearly meant to represent a brand of liberalism that permeated imperialism in its most expansive decade: the fantasy of virtue. The word ‘imperium’ in Latin translates to ‘control’. Where the Romans spoke frankly about a system of foreign, supreme command, Great Britain had a more hypocritical conception of paternalism. ‘Race’, a word without mature etymological precedents before European globalisation, was one ideological justification for imperial exploitation. An obsession with the concept of civilisation – and within that, the recurrent staging of exotic confrontations between ‘man’ and ‘nature’ – was the gambit of British imperial-era cinema. (An instructive listing of abundant newsreels and work from this period lives on the Colonial Film archiving project.)

And yet, for all Palestine 36’s focus on thuggish Brits, much of this potential for analysis and understanding goes unexplored. Narratively, the plot time spent on loathsome colonial personnel reroutes us from a deeper and more original inspection of the Arab forces’ machinations (how does a revolt work? And how does it succeed or fail?). This structure also deprives us of scenes with the most charismatic cast member, Karim Daoud Anaya, a Palestinian stage actor in his moving, impressive screen debut. The transformation of Anaya’s empathetic villager from civilian to insurgent is meant to function as the film’s backbone as well as its counterpoint to the historical stereotype of the ‘dangerous primitive’ under colonial concern. What results is a film lacking the inspired, hard-edged energy of a serious resistance movement. 

There are any number of ways that a film can innovate: devising fresh formal strategies, presenting new styles and techniques (shooting, staging, lighting, sound and so on), in theme and in subject matter. Palestine 36 does the latter – revealing a slice of the world previously concealed from a global audience’s screens. I look forward to the moment when stories name the problem – the historical injustice of Israel’s occupation – using novel cinematic language. In hewing closely to historical accuracy, mass appeal and the possibility for art’s corrective function, Jacir disavows her obligations to rich, plausible and exciting fiction.

_{^{Image credit: Nadine Marfurt via Unsplash}}