Palestine 36 (2025)

Annemarie Jacir opens her film on a farmer’s hands working dry soil, and I knew within that first minute what kind of movie I was in for: one that trusts land and labour to carry meaning before a single line of dialogue does. Palestine 36 tells the story of Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), a young man pulled between his village and the driving job that takes him into Jerusalem, as the 1936 Arab Revolt against British rule gathers force around him. It is history filmed as inevitability, and Jacir, working from her own screenplay, never lets the audience forget that everyone in this story is walking towards a collision they can see coming.

I went in expecting a lecture and found, instead, a family drama with a curfew hanging over it. Hiam Abbass, playing Hanan, the steely matriarch of the family Yusuf hopes to marry into, does more with a held glance across a kitchen table than most films manage in an entire subplot; Jeremy Irons, playing the High Commissioner, wrings real menace from a single scene of practised reasonableness. Liam Cunningham barely gets a scene at all, and the film is weaker for it. Two hours is a long time to sustain this many threads, and by the midpoint I felt the movie straining under its own historical scope, cutting between village, city, and colonial office more often than any of the three settings has room to earn.

What holds it together is Hélène Louvart’s cinematography, which finds a dry, particular light in the hill country that I have not seen used this well before. There is a wedding scene lit almost entirely by lamp and firelight that I would happily watch again on its own terms. Ben Frost’s score, by contrast, occasionally pushes where the images do not need pushing; a handful of scenes would have hit harder in silence.

I do not think Jacir is trying to be even-handed here, and I would rather she not pretend otherwise. The film has a side, and it argues for it with real conviction rather than the sanded-down neutrality that flatters no one. Whether that reads as clarity or as special pleading depends a good deal on what a viewer brings into the cinema. Few people, I suspect, watch a film about 1936 without also thinking about now.

What stays with me, days later, is not the politics but Karim Daoud Anaya’s face in the film’s quieter stretches. He carries the weight of a young man discovering that neutrality is not actually available to him, and that performance alone justifies the running time.

Good, not great. Worth an evening, especially if you already care about the region; less essential if you want a film to change your mind rather than sharpen a view you already hold.