Annemarie Jacir’s film about the Arab anti-colonial uprising in the late 1930s arrives in the UK just as the British government has declared recognition of a Palestinian state. It’s a film to compare with Michael Winterbottom’s Shoshana and Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, dramas that reopen the fraught issue of Britain’s own colonial history in Palestine.
This is a heartfelt film, if rather stolidly paced and sometimes pedagogically conveyed. The cast includes such Palestinian heavyweight actors as Hiam Abbass and Saleh Bakri as passionate rebels. Jeremy Irons plays the high commissioner Sir Arthur Wauchope who presides with bland complacency over this troublesome possession. The other colonials are divided, in the traditional style, into “good British” – Billy Howle as a troubled and ineffectually pro-Arab civil servant – and “bad British” – Robert Aramayo as the brutal Captain Orde Wingate, who here personifies the arrogance and cruelty of the coloniser, shooting civilians in cold blood and ordering the collective punishment of entire villages.
