The Weight of History on Centre Stage
Toronto’s chilly September air was thick with anticipation as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) welcomed a film whose resonance is almost painfully timely: “Palestine 36.” Thousands descended on King Street, some angling for a glimpse of Oscar winners like Jeremy Irons or the celebrated Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri. Yet this year, it wasn’t Hollywood glamour that took center stage—it was the raw pulse of political resistance and a poignant confrontation with colonial history, unfolding just as headlines carry grim updates from Gaza.
Four years in the making, “Palestine 36” is director Annemarie Jacir’s most ambitious project yet. The film sweeps viewers to 1936, amid the dusty hilltops outside Jerusalem. Palestine, then under British mandate, seethes with tension as Jewish refugees, themselves fleeing European horror, arrive to uncertain welcome. The heart of Jacir’s story is Yusuf, a young Palestinian farmer forced onto the frontlines of a swelling revolt. How does personal survival intersect with the moral imperative to resist? Jacir’s camera doesn’t shy from the binary, nor does it let us ignore the soul-shredding ambiguities of history.
As Jacir told reporters, “Screening this film today is deeply painful—every image is shadowed by today’s grief.” Projects like “Palestine 36” remind us that artistic works are never just about the past; they are “soulful, living forms of resistance.” This film asks both its characters and its audience: What are we prepared to sacrifice for justice and memory?
Art Imitates Life: Protest on the Red Carpet
Beyond that, the intersection of cinema and activism crackled in palpable ways as the cast took to TIFF’s iconic red carpet. In an audacious act that made international headlines, Palestinian actor Karim Daoud Anaya carried a plastic bag stuffed with fake blood and a keffiyeh, directly referencing the harrowing daily toll in Gaza. Watermelon pins—long a covert symbol of Palestinian identity—glinted on lapels, while actors and crew walked draped in Palestinian flags. The message was impossible to ignore: Palestinian voices refuse to be sidelined, not in art and not on the world stage.
How does a film set in pre-1948 Palestine speak so acutely to the crisis of 2025? The answer lies in the film’s visual strategy as much as its narrative. Faced with destroyed filming locations in Gaza and the ever-present trauma of recent violence, Jacir’s team relocated production to Jordan. But instead of erasing what had been lost, they digitally restored rare archival footage, reanimating Jerusalem’s streets and hills as they once were, and perhaps as they could be again. The use of these haunting visuals is not just a technical achievement—it’s a statement about memory, loss, and the resilience of storytelling even when communities are uprooted.
“We are telling you stories no one wants you to hear,” Jacir said at the premiere. “But these are stories that must be told, for there can be no justice without remembering what has been lost—and what is still being lost.”
The question lingers: Can a film rewrite the world’s view of a decades-old struggle that so many try to erase from consciousness?
International Collaboration and the Echo of Contemporary Crisis
“Palestine 36” is by no means a solitary effort. The project unfolds as a *large-scale international co-production*, entwining resources and talent from Palestine, the UK, France, Denmark, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Financial support came from unlikely allies, including Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Fund and the British Film Institute. Watermelon Pictures has snapped up rights for the U.S. and Canadian markets, positioning the film for both critical impact and commercial success as Palestine’s official submission for the Best International Feature Oscar.
A closer look reveals another layer: this coalition of backers and artists signals a growing appetite among international institutions to confront the ongoing legacy of colonialism in the Middle East. Harvard historian Rashid Khalidi has long argued that the roots of today’s violence stretch deep into the British mandate period—echoes that “Palestine 36” dramatizes with uncanny, unsettling clarity. In this sense, the film does not merely humanize Palestinians of the past. It reshapes how global audiences might interpret news headlines and policy debates of the present.
Casting choices only bolster the film’s power. Veteran actors like Liam Cunningham and D’hafer L’Abidine lend gravitas, while Hiam Abbass and Yasmine Al-Massri bring a fiercely contemporary sensibility. But it is arguably the ensemble of Palestinian actors—walking TIFF’s carpet in defiance, carrying the heavy mantle of their people’s grief—who offer the film’s most unforgettable performances. Their presence ensures “Palestine 36” is not just historical drama; it’s a call to witness and to act.
For years, critics of Western media have lamented the erasure and mischaracterization of Palestinian experience, especially as violence escalates. Films like “Palestine 36” are a rebuttal and a reclamation. Jane Fonda once called cinema “the empathy machine.” That machine is now in overdrive, urging viewers to look beyond slogans and statistics to the human realities beneath.
Why Telling This Story Now Matters More Than Ever
What is the cost of silence in the face of atrocity? Jacir’s film offers an answer, one that resonates with progressive values of justice and radical empathy for those systematically dispossessed. The enormity of making “Palestine 36”—completed after delays, forced relocations, archival rescues, and the ever-present specter of violence—is itself an act of resistance. These struggles behind the scenes mirror those onscreen, courage for courage, loss for loss.
According to a recent Pew Research Center analysis, support for an immediate ceasefire and greater Palestinian autonomy is rising globally, just as efforts to suppress Palestinian narratives intensify. In this context, the presence of “Palestine 36” at TIFF is more than cultural pageantry; it is a quiet but potent declaration that stories of oppression must be heard in every language of art, every frame of history. The red carpet, this year, was less about celebrity than solidarity—a necessary shift. Films won’t stop bombs, but they can reshape public consciousness.
In its closing moments, Jacir’s film leaves us in the uncertain dawn of 1936, hope and heartbreak interwoven. The audience is left not with closure, but with a question. When will the world finally hear—and heed—the story?
