Palestine 36

Annemarie Jacir's Palestine 36 world-premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025, in the Gala Presentations section, to a reported twenty-minute standing ovation. It went on to win the Tokyo Grand Prix at the Tokyo International Film Festival in November, took the audience prize at São Paulo, and was selected as Palestine's submission for Best International Feature at the 98th Academy Awards, eventually advancing to the December shortlist. The film is Jacir's fourth feature after Salt of This Sea (2008), When I Saw You (2012) and Wajib (2017), and her largest production to date — an international co-production whose credited producers include UK, French, Danish and Gulf-state companies alongside Jacir's own Philistine Films.

The film reconstructs the early months of the 1936 Arab uprising in Mandatory Palestine — the general strike that began in April, the British administrative response, the escalation toward armed conflict, and the three-year revolt that followed. Jacir builds an ensemble across rural villages, the urban Palestinian middle class, and the British military command. Hiam Abbass and Yasmine Al Massri anchor the women's storylines; Kamel El Basha and Saleh Bakri play among the men; Robert Aramayo plays Orde Wingate, the British officer whose reorganisation of counter-insurgency in Palestine would influence colonial counter-revolt tactics for decades. The cinematography of Hélène Louvart, who had previously shot Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro, gives the film an unusually painterly visual register for a historical drama on this scale.

Critical reception was nearly unanimous. The Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus stood at 98–100% across the autumn 2025 release window; Variety and The Guardian singled out the production scale and Jacir's handling of a multi-strand narrative. The film arrived in cinemas during the most acute phase of public attention on Palestine in a generation, and reviews frequently noted the difficulty of separating the work from its moment — though most critics returned to the film's own historical specificity, its restraint, and its refusal of any single explanatory frame.