It is a black hole, the director and writer Annemarie Jacir tells me of the year 1936. Our discussion has fallen back in time to the start of the first mass Palestinian revolt against British rule and Zionism. It’s the year from which her latest film, Palestine 36, takes its name, a year she’s heard about her entire life. It’s also the origin, she believes, of today’s reality – even if for others it’s a historical void. “A lot of people don’t even know, surprisingly, that the British were even in Palestine,” Jacir says incredulously. “This film is for Palestinians. It’s our story that hasn’t been told.”
The veteran film-maker is undoubtedly well placed to tell it: this is her fourth feature to be selected as Palestine’s Oscar entry. And although a period film, it does not belong to the past. While years have passed since the executions, widespread detentions and demolished villages under Britain’s 30-year rule, she argues that history is alive. At one point in the film, a young Palestinian man is tied to the front of a vehicle by British soldiers, as a human shield. While filming the scene in Nablus, a city in the West Bank, the very same day Israeli soldiers strapped a wounded Palestinian man to a military vehicle during a raid in Jenin. “Everything that is going on now was set up back then in 1936; everything that the Israeli army does, in fact, is all taken from that moment,” says Jacir.
