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On Nov. 7, 2025, Annemarie Jacir’s historical drama “Palestine 36” opened the 13th edition of the Boğaziçi Film Festival. The film, which is a TRT coproduction, tells the story of the fictional village of al Basma near Ramallah and the town-village rift that was endemic in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the 20th century.
We follow the lives of several characters, including the villager Yusuf who works for the intellectual couple Kholoud and Amir, the widower Rabab, Palestinian dock workers in Jaffa, the ready-for-compromise landowners and a priest and his son. Jacir is bent on giving us a panorama of Palestinian lives in the year 1936, making sure that the story of the Mandate years is told through Palestinian eyes and not the European Jews who came to settle.
On opening night, after the screening, there was a short Q and A where Jacir told the audience how special it was to screen the film in Istanbul, where the audience shares so much with the film’s history. I have been following the fortunes of the film for a while and it is true that when screened in Istanbul, the film’s “war of independence” angle feels much more immediate: the British occupation and the way British soldiers stop people randomly on the street feeling very familiar from Istanbul’s occupation by the British, or indeed, the French occupation of Antep. The scenes where Kholoud and Amir are entertaining British officers while the villagers are facing settler violence feel very “Fatih-Harbiye,” Peyami Safa’s novel about the disconnect between a traditionally Turkish and Europeanized neighborhood of Istanbul.
In the Q and A, Jacir shared the stage with her producers and actor Saleh Bakri, who plays one of the leading rebels in the film. With the advent of the genocide in Gaza, Bakri has used his platform more and more to highlight the plight of his people and on opening night, he emphasized how his acting was now his form of resistance, that his “bullets” would live on film forever. The actor gave a master class the next day and talked about how he was born into a family that was in the film business and how, with time, he learned to value being involved in films that told the Palestinian story.
On opening night, one of the biggest cheers was for Liam Cunningham, a darling of Turkish audiences with his role in “Game of Thrones,” but also a favorite for being Irish, a people readily recognized as being pro-Palestine. When asked how he got involved in the project, Cunningham answered that when the producers said that they were going to make a film about Palestinian resistance, his answer was yes and that he didn’t even need to know the details. When one of the producers, Cat Villiers, took the mike, she said that Jacir approached her saying that it was a project ‘about both her countries’ and that is how Villiers knew it was going to be about the Mandate period.
In her interviews, Jacir has underlined that the first Arab rebellion, against the British, started with the nationwide strike in 1936, a moment of pride for the Palestinians in showing who it is that makes the cities of the country run. Jacir focuses on this moment as a moment of possibilities- indeed, the whole film is filled with moments that make it seem like history could have gone a different way.
The gala screening was followed the next day by a public screening where the audience lived and breathed with the characters and felt a sense of possibility, too. The scene where the upper-class Jerusalemite Atef family sits at a table to hear the Peel commission’s verdict on the fate of the two nations in Palestine was where everyone held their breath. It was a scene where all the atmosphere of possibility that had been building up through the film was very quietly destroyed and you could hear the audience, who already live in the reality of 2025, gasp. When asked about this scene, Jacir said that the scene was a moment of stillness after all the action, a moment of taking stock. She said that she didn’t need to add anything to the declaration text to make the scene more dramatic because the atrocity of the language was already there. The Jews are to have a state in Palestine, and the Palestinians must engage in an act of “sacrifice” for peace to reign in the world. For a nation where October and November are filled with symbolic dates of the republic, this moment, too, felt too immediate: every Turkish school child knows the Anatolian map that is divided between the Allied Forces mandates.
In the Q and A one member of the audience asked the team if they received any legal or boycott threats. One of the producers, Ossama Bawardi, answered that as they were quite an international team, they navigated by claiming to be a Palestinian, British or French crew as the need arose. When it came to being boycotted for being outspokenly pro-Palestine, Cunningham talked about how the film company Paramount had just published a Blacklist of actors they wouldn’t be working with and said that he would be very disappointed if he wasn’t on it.
As the reaction and the questions from the audience attest, “Palestine 36,” telling the story of the beginnings of the Arab resistance, feels like the beginning of the telling of the history of Palestine on screen through Palestinian eyes. Having been bombarded for decades by films that glorify the heroism of European Jewish settlers, the film is a reclaiming of a past that has been long overdue and sets an example for historical narratives to come.
