LAUREN FRAYER, HOST:
The new movie "Palestine 36" is an epic historical drama set in the period when the British controlled what is now Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. It's about a real-life anticolonial uprising in 1936.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "PALESTINE 36")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) You're at the crossroads of a major moment in time. Perhaps you should consider which side of history you want to be on.
FRAYER: That uprising helped set in motion what is still in motion there today. The film's writer and director is Annemarie Jacir, and her film is the Palestinians' entry for next year's Oscars. Welcome to the show.
ANNEMARIE JACIR: Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here.
FRAYER: So Annemarie, I actually interviewed you 25 years ago. I was a newbie journalist, and you had just made a movie set at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank. And now, here we are talking about your latest movie about the occupation. What made you make this movie in this moment?
JACIR: Oh my goodness. You know, your name seemed familiar to me, and I was sure that we had met. That's incredible. "Palestine 36," this epic moment of our history - I wanted to go back to it and explore it in film and from a sort of Palestinian perspective of that time when the British were in Palestine, which also is a - strangely seems like a time that a lot of people have forgotten about.
There were many reasons I wanted to approach it, but one of the main ones was that I found that I'm - I live in Palestine, and my daily life here under military occupation is formed by that moment. It doesn't even feel like a period film because, you know, I started researching, and I - first I start - I saw images of checkpoints, British soldiers searching Palestinians at checkpoints, going to work.
I was really struck by that because that's my daily life and all Palestinians' daily life. And all I could think about was, this is amazing. Like, our grandparents were being searched. Our parents were searched. You know, we're getting searched. My child gets searched, and it's like an endless repetition of history in which we're just made to feel like criminals for just trying to go about our daily lives.
FRAYER: How did you prepare for this project?
JACIR: You know, I'd heard about it, and so there was the oral history side to it of asking my father's generation and my mother's generation and other people and listening and then reading Palestinian diaries but also British diaries. You know, there aren't any films about this period, really, but there's an immense amount of, you know, academic and historical work. I was reading British historians, Palestinian historians, Israeli historians.
And then I was looking at archives. The British documented everything very well. And that was very useful to me to visualize the world that is now lost. And I use archive in the film but also in the scenes themselves. You know, we were almost going one to one. There was a women's demonstration in front of the high commissioner's office or the radio inauguration. There's a lot of photographs of that event. I mean, we have people dressed. We knew what they were wearing. We mimicked what we were seeing in the photos.
FRAYER: The movie follows Yusuf, who lives in a village but works in the city, sort of moves between two worlds. What decision does Yusuf have to make?
JACIR: Yusuf is someone who - you know, he's in this village. He has a job in the city. You know, his family are farmers. He doesn't want that. He wants to do something else. He's not interested in village life. So he's going back and forth, and the revolt begins, which is something he doesn't want to be part of.
You know, history doesn't happen - we don't choose political lives. We enter into situations because history and life affects us. And so, for me, that was, you know, the story of, you know, Yusuf, who is confronted with a rebellion and an uprising happening and understanding that he is suddenly voiceless and he is not part of that class, and he's not part of that world or doesn't - he realizes he doesn't want to be part of it.
FRAYER: There's also this junior diplomat who has a conscience. I actually got to meet some of the actors at a screening in London, and Billy Howle, who plays Thomas Hopkins, the young diplomat, told me that being part of this project taught him things that he never learned in school. And I wonder if that's what you want for your audience.
JACIR: A lot of people asked me, how is it that the BBC and all these, you know, British partners - our British co-producers and British cast - you know, the film is a bit harsh about the British, I would say. And then I said, oh, well, I think the British are coming to terms with their colonial past because, of course, those were the conversations I was having with them. You know, they weren't saying, oh, you need to, you know, make this softer, nothing like that. They were very supportive of the project.
And when we - everything fell apart with this project. We'd spent a year preparing for it, and then October 7 happened, and we lost everything. We lost all our locations. We lost everything. And many financiers would have pulled out of a project like this because we didn't know if we were going to be able to make it at all.
FRAYER: The land itself, the very terrain, felt like a character in this film. Was that on purpose?
JACIR: Yeah, absolutely. It was for me. And, you know, the film is an ensemble film, and it's about all these different, you know, stories that stitch together and weave together in this mass uprising. But the land is the constant. The land is the thing that connects them all. And so that's why, for me, it was also very difficult and very painful that, you know, we had to move. I kept insisting, we've got to come back because that land, those hills, the walls, like, all of those details - maybe other people don't see it, but we see it. And it's important, I think, to have authenticity in our work. You know, we don't - this is not a religious conflict. It's not all the things that, you know, people try to say it is. It's - it is about land.
FRAYER: Yeah. You have in the film these scenes of early Jewish settlers tilling that land. What did you want the audience to know about them?
JACIR: This is, you know, before the Holocaust, but, of course, you know, the crimes of Europe had already begun. There were pogroms, and there was antisemitism, and Jews were fleeing for safety. And I wanted to show that. I wanted - you see in the archive people standing there waiting to get off the boats. You see, in a woman's hand, a Nazi passport. I really felt that that was important to the whole world. You know, Palestine has always been a place of many communities.
I wanted to focus on the British complicity in this mess that we live today. But also, it's important to understand the whole way that Zionism was part of this. And the Zionist project was in line with the project of empire and colonialism and how to take over and control a place and eventually disinherit the people who live there.
FRAYER: That's filmmaker Annemarie Jacir. Her movie, "Palestine 36" is playing in several U.S. cities and opens in more early next year. Thank you.
JACIR: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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