Annemarie Jacir’s film about the Great Arab Revolt has been almost unanimously acclaimed, and for good reason. But every historical film decides where it raises the curtain, and that decision deserves to be discussed.
I left the cinema with a feeling that was hard to name. I had seen a good film—well shot, gripping, capable of giving a face and fear back to a past that almost always appears to us reduced to dates—and yet a stubborn unease stayed with me. Not because what was shown was unreal, but because I sensed it was not the whole story. That difference, so discreet, changes everything.
Wars do not begin when the first shot is fired. Historical films do not begin where history begins either; they begin where someone decides the viewer should enter. Palestina 36 chooses to enter in 1936, when the accumulated discontent under the British Mandate becomes open revolt. It is a legitimate choice and dramatically very effective. But no choice is neutral. The starting point of a narrative shapes what we believe we have understood when we leave.
Cinema does not aspire to be a history textbook, and it does not have to be. Its strength lies precisely in choosing characters, concentrating conflicts, and turning a distant time into an experience we can feel. A film needs a point of view. Without it there is no narrative, only an accumulation of data. The problem, when it appears, is not in the film. Rather, it is in us, whenever we confuse the intensity of a story with the totality of History.
And it is worth saying to what extent that point of view has been recognized. Palestina 36 came out of its Toronto premiere to a twenty-minute ovation, won the top prize at the Tokyo Festival, has close to 98% favorable reviews, and made the Oscar shortlist for Best International Feature as the Palestinian submission. Nothing that follows disputes those merits.
The date in the title is not the beginning
1936 explains a great deal, but it does not explain everything. Left behind are decades of imperial decisions, incompatible political promises, migrations, land purchases and displacement, along with internal divisions that almost never fit on screen: neither did Palestinian Arabs form a single will, nor did the Jewish world respond to a single idea or strategy. And there is Europe, where antisemitism was not a side detail but a growing threat to millions of people. The film mentions it in passing—a character explains that immigrants arrive because their own countries do not want them—but one line of dialogue is not context. Between 1929 and 1939 some 250,000 Jews arrived in Palestine, largely from Germany and Poland, and many of them were not traveling toward an abstraction; they were fleeing something very concrete.
That background is not an erudite add-on. It intersects with what the film tells. The revolt achieved its most tangible political result in 1939, when the British White Paper drastically restricted Jewish immigration, at the worst imaginable moment for those trying to leave Europe. The two chains of causes ran intertwined, and that is why it is so difficult to narrate one without the other leaving a gap.
Naming that background does not require diluting colonial violence or denying the asymmetry of power, nor does it demand manufacturing a moral equidistance that distributes blame in turns. It asks for something simpler and harder: accepting that a historical explanation cannot be reduced to the memory of a single actor, however true and painful that memory may be. Reality does not lose force when it becomes complex. It loses comfort.
Off-screen space
In cinema, “off-screen space” is what exists even if the camera does not show it. In a historical film, that space can contain entire years, whole populations, remote causes, and uncomfortable contradictions. Framing is, inevitably, excluding; editing is joining certain causes to certain consequences and leaving other connections out. Time jumps, absences, and barely sketched characters are not deceptions, but they are part of the final meaning. They guide sympathy, order causality, and decide which facts will seem like origins and which like responses.
That is why it matters less to rule on whether Palestina 36 is “true” or “false” than to ask what truth it has decided to tell. A work can be honest to the experience of its characters and, at the same time, offer a partial view. In fact, almost all good historical fiction does. The viewer’s maturity consists in holding both ideas without using one to cancel the other.
And it is not only my impression. Oren Kessler, author of Palestine 1936, the reference book on this episode, counts barely two words spoken by Jewish characters in two hours of footage and notes the absence of the mufti of Jerusalem, a central figure of the period. What is revealing is that several enthusiastic reviews describe the same thing without considering it a flaw. One writes matter-of-factly that “there are no Zionist characters in this film”; another calls the structure “schematic and sometimes didactic”. When supporters and detractors describe the same film and differ only in their judgment, the description is no longer in dispute.
The objection that must be addressed
There is an answer to all this, and it is a good one. A work about a colonized population is not obliged to share out a voice with those in whose name it was dispossessed. Demanding nuanced Jewish characters within a Palestinian story can be an elegant way of denying that story its own center, and European cinema rarely imposes that symmetry on itself when narrating its own occupations. I share it in part. But I think it does not cover all the ground. One thing is to choose a narrative center—that is simply making cinema, and Jacir does it well—and another is for the editing to distribute causes in such a way that some seem like origins and others like responses. There we are no longer debating point of view, but causality, and causality is history’s proper terrain.
Between memory and history
Perhaps it is worth distinguishing two operations we tend to mix. Memory preserves a lived pain and transmits it from within. It needs names, faces, belonging, and its authority comes from having been there. History tries to widen the focus, compare times, listen to versions that contradict one another, and accept that the past does not lend itself to easy ordering. We need both, and neither replaces the other. The risk appears when one memory occupies all the available space and a legitimate experience ends up turned into the only possible key for reading.
When the lights come up
We live in a moment in which a film or a series is, for many people, the main gateway into a historical episode. That capacity to awaken interest is valuable, and it would be petty to disdain it. But it imposes a responsibility, and when the screening ends that responsibility changes hands: it passes from the director to the viewer. We can stay with the closed emotion, already ready to become certainty, or use it as an impulse to ask more. In the second case, the film ceases to be the end of an explanation and becomes the beginning of a search.
Palestina 36 deserves to be seen for the force with which it restores gravity and humanity to a past that still weighs on the present, and it deserves to be discussed for the way it selects, concentrates, and falls silent. Not to discredit it, but to extend the conversation it opens. Perhaps that is the best disposition toward historical cinema: letting oneself be affected without surrendering judgment. Because that ninety-eight percent of favorable reviews measures one thing—that the film is well made—and does not measure at all the other: whether, when the lights come up, we believe we have understood the episode, or have only begun to look at it.
