Lathspell said:
I would be surprised if they told this story in any way to make the Jewish people look good.
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Fresh from a 20-minute ovation at Toronto, the film-maker's historical drama reveals how Britain's 1936 crackdown created the blueprint for the ongoing genocide in Gaza
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It is a black hole, the director and writer Annemarie Jacir tells me of the year 1936. Our discussion has fallen back in time to the start of the first mass Palestinian revolt against British rule and Zionism.
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While years have passed since the executions, widespread detentions and demolished villages under Britain's 30-year rule, she argues that history is alive. At one point in the film, a young Palestinian man is tied to the front of a vehicle by British soldiers, as a human shield. While filming the scene in Nablus, a city in the West Bank, the very same day Israeli soldiers strapped a wounded Palestinian man to a military vehicle during a raid in Jenin. "Everything that is going on now was set up back then in 1936; everything that the Israeli army does, in fact, is all taken from that moment," says Jacir.
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She tells me her father, born in 1936, survived the 1948 Nakba the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland after the creation of Israel and speaks nonstop of the trauma and dispossession of the past. Jacir's own backyard in Bethlehem is littered with canisters from Israeli weapons, tear gas, bullets, all labelled 'Made in the US'.
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Palestine 36's heart is, however, in the villages, cotton fields and olive groves where the resistance to British rule is shown to take root and where Khalid soon returns to take up arms and join the rebels. Guerilla bombings, brutal British reprisals and one episode of Jewish settler violence do not overbalance a film that finds its emotional centre in the friendship between two pre-adolescent children: Kaleem (Ward Helou) a shoe-shine boy who is the son of a Christian priest and his Muslim playmate Afra (Wardi Eilabouni)
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