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.
Jacir coolly laces her dialogue with echoes of the future: Wingate fiercely espouses his belief in a Zionist future for the region and tells a sceptic, “Perhaps you should consider what side of history you want to be on.” There is another complex reverberation when a Palestinian worker says: “They are replacing us with Jewish labour!”
There is a huge cast of characters, with the film’s emotive content spread carefully across them all, although the heart of the story is Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), a village boy who gets a job in Jerusalem with a worldly, centrist-liberal newspaper editor who is not averse to making an accommodation with Zionism. Yusuf is not particularly political but is inevitably radicalised by the brutal British. None of these characters quite flares passionately into life but all are persuasively portrayed, and it’s a vehement reminder of what doesn’t get taught in British schools.
• Palestine 36 is in UK and Irish cinemas from 31 October.
