‘Palestine 36’ Filmmaker Annemarie Jacir Talks Recreating 1930s Wartime & Modern Relevancy: “People Hear The Other Point Of View From The Victors But There’s Different Stories To Be Told”

Old conflicts need new perspectives now more than ever in the modern world. Annemarie Jacir’s latest feature film, Palestine 36is set against the backdrop of British conflict in Palestine when the territory was under British mandatory control and explores the lead-up to and events of the Palestinian Arab Revolt from 1936 to 1939.  Primarily following Yusuf, a young man who drifts between his rural home and the bustling city of Jerusalem, he becomes radicalized as the villages rise to fight against the British occupation.

The film, which was chosen as Palestine’s official selection for Best International Feature at the 98th Academy Awards, will hold a series of upcoming screenings across more than 50 cities in the U.S. and Canada on November 29 in honor of the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People.

Below, Jacir speaks to Deadline about crafting the film, unique actor activities, and the importance of learning from the past to help navigate the harsh new realities of the future.

DEADLINE: Correct me if I’m wrong, but covering the British mandate over Palestine is a rare topic to find in cinema, right? When did you know this was the angle you were going to cover, and why was it so appealing to you?

ANNEMARIE JACIR: No, you’re right. There hasn’t been any story about the British mandate, definitely not from a Palestinian perspective, at least. There’s one British film about that period that I know about, but there’s nothing else. And there’s a lot of Palestinian films that talk about 1948, but not about this period before. And for me, it’s so critical. It was such a massive moment in our history and such a critical one that really sets up everything that happens leading up to 1948’s Palestinian War and everything since then.

I live in Palestine. The situation of military occupation in all its details is all set up by the British at this moment. It’s the blueprint for what we’re living in now in terms of the checkpoints, collective punishment, human shields and torture methods. So, I found that interesting and made sure the story always feels current and important to now.

DEADLINE: This film is incredibly timely. How has the response been since you’ve been showing this film? I can only imagine the range of responses you’ve been getting. Also, is there a fear in covering this for you? How have you been processing all of this?

JACIR: It’s all interesting. How I’ve been processing this is that it took so long to make this film and involved so many people. Then we lived, and we continue to live, in the darkest moment of our entire history – and we’ve had so many dark moments. So, for the whole crew, myself and my team, we looked for light and to do something at this time, and not to feel hopelessness and despair. But we are still processing all of this, and I think it will take a long time to do so. Of course, for this film, it feels current to now, but it’s also the ’30s. And I don’t know if we’re ready to talk about or address what’s going on right now, because it’s extremely painful.

DEADLINE: This is undoubtedly an ensemble film, but I’m curious about the background actors as well. There’s a ton of stunts and explosions. I don’t think you’ve done something like this before in your filmography. How did you approach this?

JACIR: Right, never on this level before. You’re the first person to ask me about this.

DEADLINE: That’s wild, it’s such a huge part of the film. Not only does the main cast feel so lived in but so do all the background actors.

JACIR: It’s funny because even when we were financing the film, one of our producers was looking for money, and he talked to some European producers who were like, “Why does Annemarie want to make such a [spectacle]? Why is she trying to play with the big boys?” But I wanted to tell this story.

It was massive. There were so many extras, SFX, and explosions – which I hadn’t worked with before – but my amazing SFX team was incredible. I wrote the script without thinking about budget or what was or wasn’t possible because you have to be free when you work. So, I wrote everything I wanted to, and then was like, “OK, we’ll deal with that later in production.” We found ways to do things on a low budget while maintaining good quality. We built those British vehicles from scrap metal.

DEADLINE: What did the scope of the research for this film look like?

JACIR: My process of researching, financing and writing was about eight or nine years. But for the actual pre-production on the film, we all had the advantage of living in Palestine.  I live in Palestine, and my team does too. So, we’re not coming from abroad to work somewhere for a couple of weeks and then leave. So, we could go on a location scout and come back and regroup, and then next weekend we could do something else. I spent one year with the producer, the production designer and a core team preparing for the film.

Something interesting that we did as well was plant crops. We had a green team that was figuring out [period-accurate crops and shrubbery]. For example, we don’t plant cotton or tobacco anymore. So, I had the extras and the actors do cotton-picking lessons and how to make bread the traditional way, even though you don’t see that in the film. It was all part of the preparation for the cast and extras. Also, we had a British soldier come in and teach them how to act like a British soldier. I am not in the army. We’re not army people. I don’t know how to hold a gun. So, we had this British military expert come, and he was on set with us. We gathered all the European-looking extras we could find – as we couldn’t afford to bring in professional extras –and they are mostly guys who work with human rights organizations. They became part of the team, and the soldier did boot camp training with them, but some of them quit because he was so strict! But hey, we made it.

DEADLINE: How did the current situation in Palestine affect your shooting locations?

JACIR: So, the whole film was supposed to be shot in Palestine, and that’s what we had prepared for one year, with prepping all the locations and everything. It was all Palestine. After October 7th, we lost our locations. The village that we had restored and the plants and the crops we had planted there, we lost all of that. We were not able to return there. It was too dangerous. It was already a bit edgy before, but manageable, and then it became impossible. It was dangerous to put the cast or crew there, and things were worsening regionally. So, in the beginning, we waited to see what we were going to do, and we were very much also just glued to the news and to the situation. And then we eventually had to go to Jordan and recreate another village and start from zero and build up all of that again, planting and all of that. So that’s why part of the film is shot in Jordan: it was safer when we went there, but then things spread regionally. And now we had missiles flying overhead, and we had to stop production and then restart production.

But eventually we came back to Palestine, and I really insisted on it because some of the financiers wanted me to finish somewhere else, like Greece, Morocco, or Cyprus. And I just couldn’t, I had to finish it in Palestine. I was like, “It’s important. The land is important to the film. It’s an ensemble film with all these characters, but the one thing they have in common is the land. This is what we are all connected on.” And so, it’s important for me to see those stones and those culturally specific things. Maybe someone who’s not from the region doesn’t see those differences, but we do, and I think they’re important.

DEADLINE: How did you find Karim Daoud Anaya to play Yusuf? And how did you work with him to play this character, who becomes extremely radicalized by the end of the film?

JACIR: He’s incredible. I’m really lucky. I had great casting directors, Luna [Mouallem] and Same [Wakeem]two Palestinian women who sent his audition to me. I watched it first, and I was so affected by it – he’d never acted before in a film. He does do theater. He also does parkour. He comes from a tough Palestinian village called Qalqilya, just totally surrounded by the wall, and he does parkour as a way to be free to escape all the barriers in life. He’s an incredibly sensitive person. Yusuf is the person I always saw as the thread that connects everything. As an aside, I have to be honest, when I saw this great audition, I also saw that his eyes were so blue. We have a lot of blue eyes, but I work with Saleh Bakri a lot, who plays Khalid, the port worker. Saleh is in all my films. I cast him in his first role, and we’ve been partners in crime ever since. He looks kind of similar. It’s important to me who you put on screen and what those people look like. I like natural-looking people. So, when Karim showed up with these blue eyes, I had imagined Yusuf in a different way. It’s a very shallow thing, but in my mind, Yusuf was dark skinned and dark-eyed.

So, I kept pushing Karim’s audition out of my head and I kept pushing the casting director to find other people. They did bring me other people, but I was just so affected by that audition, so I finally said that I wanted to meet him, and we met and he did more auditions. He’s an incredible person, sensitive and generous. He’s a star. So, then I just had Saleh put on brown contacts instead.

DEADLINE: What would you like audiences to consider as they watch this film?

JACIR: I never know how to answer this question because for me, I hope that people can connect to it and find something for themselves in it. It’s a big period film, but I’m not interested in the big part. I’m interested in the very intimate and the relationships that people have with each other, and how normal people find themselves in a situation that they didn’t ask for. Politics and history change us, and it can affect any of us at any time. We don’t look for that; it just happens. You make decisions in your life, and maybe they’re the wrong decision, maybe they’re the right decision, but it’s what happens to us. And for me, that’s what the core of the story is, this group of people at this moment and the decisions that they make.

So, I hope people can see that, and I hope that people can also see that it’s a perspective on our point of view at this moment. I think people hear the other point of view and grow up hearing the view from the victors, the ones who won, but there’s so many different stories to be told. And when we see that globally, I hope it’s a perspective that people will be open to.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]