Palestine 36 (12A)

(Subtitled)

Prescient is perhaps the most appropriate word to describe Palestine 36. As the whole world focuses on Gaza, a film about the history of the conflict could not be more timely.

Director Annemarie Jacir dives deep into the archives, the social tapestries, and coloniser tactics, to ask how Palestine as we know it today might have come to originate in the Palestinian Revolt of 1936-1939, when it was a British colony.

Yousef (Karim Daoud Anaya) is a young man who goes between the small farming village where he was born, and Jerusalem, where he works as a driver for Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine), a Palestinian journalist who also moonlights as a political operative. In the villages, the farmers see their land dwindle as settlers escaping antisemitism in Europe seize some of it. In the city, British officers and Palestinian freedom fighters set their agenda for the inevitable conflict for the future of Palestine.

Two themes emerge as central to the narrative: the economic war over land, and the way citizens come to realise that their country is being stolen and start to organise a resistance. A must see.