Israeli police banned this film, then it landed on an Oscars shortlist

There's one scene director and writer Annemarie Jacir fought tooth and nail for in her latest movie Palestine 36.

The historical epic encapsulates the 1936 Palestinian revolt against British colonialism, and contains lavish sets, gunfire battles and grand explosions.

But the scene Jacir needed to include in her vision is of a little girl, running along the walls of Jerusalem; an arresting shot that came within a hair's breadth from not existing at all.

In 2023, weeks before Jacir and her crew were to begin filming in her home country, the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel shut production down.

"I was getting a lot of location images of Cyprus, of Greece, of Malta, old cities. Many, many places have old cities and old city walls," Jacir tells ABC Arts.

"The producers were like, you just really need to think at this point with what's happening, that this is what we have to do. I kept saying, I'm not going to film anywhere except Jerusalem. It really means something to us. It might look like another old city to you, but to us, it's not another old city.

"A lot of things I had to compromise because of the political situation and what happened to us. But there are certain things I wouldn't compromise. That was one of them."

Jacir was committed to her vision, relocating to Jordan to complete additional scenes before being allowed back into Palestine a year later to wrap shooting.

"I think in a way it was a survival mechanism, like we just have to keep doing it. We all felt that way. It felt more important though. It was already important, but then suddenly, it just had a different meaning. All of it had a different meaning."

Going back

Palestine 36 is the only feature film to be shot in the country in the last two years, and one of just a few films to put 1930s Palestine on the big screen.

Bubbling over three years from 1936 to 1939, the uprising marked a violent time in the country's history as Palestinian Arabs sought to gain independence from British colonial rule which saw locals pushed out of their land and homes, alongside an influx of European settlers escaping the horrors of World War II.

Tens of thousands of people were killed or wounded, with the uprising providing important context for the current Israel-Gaza war.

"It's surprising how few people know about it. It's so critical to understand and talk about this period if we are to talk about anything else that comes afterwards, the Nakba and (the war in) 1948" Jacir says.

"It's very hard to do that without understanding what happens here in '36."

Jacir's movie is not a single story but an amalgamation of many: the young Arab pulled into an armed rebellion; the farmers of the local village who find themselves under siege; the Oxford-educated journalist bound by truth; the British representative torn between duty and morality; the Palestinian children born into violence.

Jacir says she felt the pressure in balancing her duty as an artist to create a story and her responsibility as a Palestinian to educate others.

"We're putting something on screen that hasn't been put on screen before. It's our story and we have to honour it," she says.

"Everybody on the film had a family member that was alive during '36. The cast, they thought about it a lot. Saleh Bakri, who plays Khalid, brought to me a picture of his grandfather who worked in Yafa on the docks, actually, as Khalid does [in the movie].

'He said, 'I want to look like him. Can I look like him?' So we modelled his look after his grandfather."

Coming back to Palestine to film was a sobering experience for the cast and crew with deep roots in the region.

"It was very difficult and very painful and I think you see that on screen. I think you see that the cast is in pain because we're performing acts of violence while there was real violence happening around us," Jacir says.

"We were already trying to get through checkpoints every day and we were getting stopped by settlers but we already had this mentality that nothing was going to stop us."

Rebel, Rebel

Palestine 36 premiered to a 20-minute standing ovation at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

It then picked up Best Film at the Tokyo International Film Festival, and by December had secured a spot on the prestigious Best International Feature Film shortlist for the 2026 Academy Awards.

A month later, Jacir and her team released a statement saying a screening of Palestine 36 at Yabous Cultural Centre in Jerusalem had been shut down by Israeli police, and that an "an official notice prohibiting any future screenings of the film" had been issued.

"Honestly, I wasn't expecting that because there are no Israelis in the film," Jacier says.

"It's about a Palestinian village and the brutality of the British. Yes, there's political Zionism and we understand the whole political context that's happening in the film.

"But it's a really a pity that the film was robbed from its audiences, and it is really interesting and telling that they put a notice on the door saying the film is forbidden from being seen because it violates some anti-terrorism law."

Despite being one of the most difficult films she's worked on, Jacir is proud to bring the story of the 1936 rebellion to cinemas around the world.

"It's important that we remember as people in the world that we have a voice …we have agency and that is something even though these are the darkest times," she says.

The power of a unified people is the reason Palestine 36 has no main characters, but is instead a "collective story", Jacir says.

"That's why the British started the idea of collective punishment; there's power in the collective," she says.