Annemarie Jacir stepped onstage at the Toronto International Film Festival flanked by her cast, but she wasn’t there to bask in festival polish. She looked out at the audience, smiled, and delivered the line that will follow this film wherever it goes:
“Don’t let my smile deceive you. Smiling is an act of resistance.”
That set the tone for Palestine 36 — a film not simply about the 1936 uprising against British rule, but about the unbroken chain of resistance that connects then to now.
THE FILM
Palestine 36 follows Yusuf, a villager straddling Jerusalem and the countryside as the revolt builds against land seizures and empire’s chokehold. Jacir refuses to hand us a soft-focus history lesson. Her camera lingers on dust, on hunger, on the small collisions of dignity and domination. It’s patient, deliberate, but never still — like a drumbeat you can feel in your chest.
The performances carry the weight of generations: Hiam Abbass and Saleh Bakri, veterans of Palestinian cinema, playing characters who refuse to vanish into the footnotes of somebody else’s history. And then Jeremy Irons, cast as the British High Commissioner, a performance so steeped in smugness that you want to hiss at the screen.
THE ROOM
TIFF audiences are trained in the choreography of polite applause. This wasn’t that. When the credits rolled, the clapping stretched on — five minutes, then ten. It didn’t die down, it mutated. The applause gave way to a chant that shook the rafters: “FREE PALESTINE.” In the upper balcony, a flag appeared, green-white-red-black, waving like a dare.
Festival decorum collapsed into something closer to an uprising. This wasn’t cinema as escapism. This was cinema as rallying point.
THE VERDICT
Palestine 36 is not just a movie — it’s an intervention. It insists that history is alive, that art can still wound and heal at once, and that even inside a festival branded by sponsors, Palestine can’t be erased.
Jacir told us not to be fooled by her smile. She was right. Behind that smile is fire.
If you believe cinema can be resistance and even a smile can carry defiance, support Closer to the Edge so we can keep bringing these stories to light.
It's perfectly fine to write about this movie and the reaction of the audience. But by lauding the chanting of "Free Palestine," you're inadvertently endorsing the eradication of Israel. "Free Palestine" is interchangeable with "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," which is uniformly acknowledged as a call to intifada, whose goal is destruction of Israel.
I love your work; it's critically important in the quest to save democracy. But please remember that it's trump and his minions who have totally politicized support for Israel, turning it into a MAGA vs. everyone else issue. There's MUCH more nuance there. Please, in the future, try to remember that. For Jewish Dems and trump resisters, it's painful to feel in lockstep with fellow non-Jewish resisters while knowing that they may want eradication of the only location in the world where Jews are officially welcome. Thank you for reading this.