Annemarie Jacir is getting ready to premiere Palestine‘s official submission for best international feature at this year’s Oscars, but she feels like she’s already won.
“I was at a family wedding and everybody was coming up to congratulate me,” the Palestinian filmmaker laughs to The Hollywood Reporter about her movie, Venice and TIFF‘s Palestine 36, a project she says was a decade of work. “I was like, I feel like I won the Oscar already because everybody’s so proud of it. Whatever happens next, I don’t care.”
“Even though they had nine films to choose from this year,” she continues, “this is the only feature film that’s [shot in Palestine] in the last two years. I think it just says something to the testament of a people and what artists can do.”
She enlisted both seasoned and up-and-coming actors: Jeremy Irons, her fellow jury member at the 2020 Berlinale, as well as Succession star Hiam Abbass, join Kamel Al Basha, Yasmine Al Massri, Jalal Altawil, Saleh Bakri, Yafa Bakri and Karim Daoud Anaya to tell a story of individual actions against the roiling history of 1936 during the British Mandate for Palestine. Rare archival footage — which Jacir was adamant be colorized in order to breathe life into the footage — sets the stage, providing a counterpoint to the dramatic action in Jerusalem. We are privy to the city’s bustling mix of peoples in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution, the migration of European Jews fleeing the Nazis and British attempts to impose colonial rule.
It’s a period of history belonging to both Palestinians and the British that attracted both the BBC and British Film Institute [BFI] as financiers on the Palestine-U.K.-France co-production. “The British colonization was all over the world… people have come to recognize that we can talk about our past. I don’t think people are trying to hide it under the rug,” says Jacir, who adds it’s also an era that not enough people know about.
Director Annemarie Jacir at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival.
Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
Palestine 36 is her fourth feature film ever, and her fourth to be put forward as Palestine’s official submission for best international feature at the Oscars. “It’s not the reason you make the film, but I’m very honored by it,” says Jacir. “It’s our gift.”
She speaks as the current war, inflamed to new heights after Hamas’ attacks on an Israeli music festival on Oct. 7 2023, has led to the loss of over 60,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. Aside from the barrage of Israeli air strikes, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has warned the region faces a “catastrophic” humanitarian crisis with no agency aid allowed into the Gaza Strip for more than five months. A permanent ceasefire is yet to be brokered.
“With what’s going on, it has a different feeling. It feels even more critical, more important, that our voices are out there,” says Jacir. “Everybody is in a lot of pain, the cast and the crew, [we’re] in this black awfulness that’s surrounding us… This is something that we’ve been living all of our lives, but so did our parents, and so did our grandparents, and in the end, we insist on life. We’re still here.”
Filming on this project began in Palestine just a week after Oct. 7. “It felt like all of Palestine was working on this film,” Jacir says, lauding all the crops planted and British military machines built just for Palestine 36. When production was forced to move to Jordan in the wake of the war, Jacir became that much more determined: “Because of the whole political situation, we had to stop and start four times,” she explains. “The last part of the film was finally shot in November of 2024 in Palestine… That was a real victory for us, that we managed to do it. We had to scale down. But I really fought for that. The financiers were like, ‘Can you just go shoot in Greece, in Cyprus, in Malta?’ It was very important to film in Palestine. It was very important to be in our homeland.”
Jacir has been told she made history with the first Arab film to premiere in the gala section at TIFF, ever. On Sept. 5, she joined her cast and crew on the carpet at the Roy Thomson Hall. “It’s a big statement.” She’s no amateur, of course, and knows exactly what she was presenting to the crowds in Toronto: “This is an audience film. It’s not an easy film to watch, but it’s an audience film and [for] the festivals in general. It’s been a long, long process and to watch it with an audience.”
Jacir pauses. Her words are steeped in immense pride, but are born from a heavy heart. “I’m nervous and excited,” she says.