I Live Here in Palestine

Over the past 20 years, Annemarie Jacir has emerged as a leading voice in Palestinian cinema. Defying the impression that Palestinians, as bearers of trauma and suffering, must only record their lives in documentary form, Jacir has made three imaginative and successful feature fiction films: Salt of This Sea (2008), When I Saw You (2012), and Wajib (2017). Jacir projects Palestine on the screen as a place that is both lived and imagined. Using classic plot lines—family feuds or denied love stories—she dramatizes the tensions arising from conflicting visions and imaginations that Palestinians have of their denied homeland. The unifying theme of Jacir’s diasporic cinema is the Palestinian will to return to their land. The honest portrayal of defiance against Israel’s physical and mental siege can only be derived from lived experience. As Jacir herself notes, “I live here in Palestine, and I feel absolutely inspired by the strength and resilience of people here.” 

The following interview was conducted over WhatsApp in January, just as a ceasefire agreement in Gaza was reached, offering Palestinians everywhere a moment of respite. 

Nadine Fattaleh: How are you doing?

Annemarie Jacir: It’s hard to answer with this genocide, with everything that has happened to our people for the past 15 months, for the last 10 years, for the last 75 years. Last night we found out that the ceasefire will go into effect on Sunday. What does that mean? It’s great, happy news that all this killing, destruction, and awful violence will be paused, stopped, hopefully forever. It’s so devastating to think about all of the lives that we have lost in the last year and a half. It’s also infuriating. 

I’m sorry. It’s hard to give an answer, because I think we have all been changed forever. 

NF: How did you decide to become a filmmaker?

AJ: I began filmmaking through observing a film editor when I lived in Texas. I used to watch her edit, and she showed me the ropes. I started playing with images at a very young age, probably around 15. I watched the classics, foreign films, docs, and indie films. Everything. I can’t say I was attracted to any genre in particular, but I was always drawn to character-driven stories. Then I took a screenwriting course. I come from a writing and literature background, so my initial interest in cinema was writing. Years later, I moved to LA and worked for a few years in the industry. I felt that I wasn’t learning too much about filmmaking or directing, though, so I decided to pursue graduate work and got a master’s degree in film. And that’s how it began. 

NF: You made your first feature film, Salt of This Sea, in 2008. What was that experience like, and what happened after that? 

AJ: I made a short film, Like Twenty Impossibles (2003), about a film crew attempting to cross Israeli checkpoints during the Second Intifada, and that became the first short Arab film to go to Cannes. That helped launch my career. It enabled me to meet people in order to make my first feature, Salt of This Sea, which was a long process. That film was about a Palestinian American who returns to Palestine, and it took about seven years to get that off the ground in terms of finding the financing because of the subject matter. 

For my second feature, When I Saw You, about the onset of the Palestinian Revolution in Jordan in 1967, I was denied entry [by the Israelis] to where I was living in Palestine. So I moved to Jordan, because it was as close as I could be, and there it took me another six years to complete that film. 

After When I Saw You, and following a lot of difficulties, I was able to return to Palestine, where I am now and have been living ever since. I made Wajib [a film about the experience of Palestinians living inside the Green Line] in 2017, and I’ve directed several shorts, experimental films, and TV episodes in between that. 

NF: You mentioned how hard it is to fund your films. How has the funding changed over time? 

AJ: It’s constantly changing, and every time you start from zero. The kind of cinema that I want to make—which is very personal, without limits or conditions—means that you have to be very stubborn and patient. That’s why I take years and years between my features. There is such a large gap of time because it is so difficult to find the support. The support is out there. You just have to find the community and the family that supports you and the work. 

My recent film, the one that’s coming out, Palestine 36, has been a huge challenge, because it’s also a very large film. I’ve found amazing people, and a lot of them are the same people who have been supporting my work since Salt of This Sea. Many of them are brand new people, people who want to support independent voices, Palestinian voices, our stories. People who understand how we have been silenced and continue to be silenced.

NF: What commonalities do you see across your films?

AJ: Return is the theme in all my films. They all focus on borders and the refugee experience. Salt of This Sea is about the refugee experience today. The main character, Soraya, is a third-generation Palestinian who returns to Palestine with all the stories of Palestine she grew up with in exile in America. When I Saw You is about the exile of 1967 [and the onset of the Palestinian Revolution]. It centers on a boy who becomes a refugee and from a very childlike, innocent perspective wants to return. Finally, Wajib is about 1948 Palestinians who stayed [in Nazareth]. They didn’t become refugees but became strangers in their own country. 

NF: Wajib seems to have a very mature ability to show the interpersonal turmoil between characters. I’m thinking in particular of the climax between Shadi and Abu Shadi. How do you see it?

AJ: In Salt of This Sea, the plot around Soraya (Suheir Hammad) and Emad (Saleh Bakri) is very much about this interpersonal relationship. They are two people who are like yin and yang. One, Soraya, has spent all her life trying to return to Palestine, and the other, Emad, wants to leave Palestine in order to be able to breathe. Both of them are refugees and marginalized in different ways, and it’s a very delicate balance between them.

Soraya and Emad’s relationship could and should be a love story, but in the end they are torn apart. Soraya carries all the anger and rage. In classic cinema, it’s not acceptable for women to be angry unless they are half-naked or sexy. Soraya is intentionally not that character. Soraya takes from Emad how to deal with that boiling anger you feel against the occupation. He tells her, “They cannot occupy us inside. They’ve occupied everything else.” Emad takes from Soraya that sense of recklessness and freedom that allows part of him, through her, to finally break free. 

When I Saw You plays with a similar dynamic between Tarek (Mahmoud Asfa) and his mother, Ghaydaa (Ruba Blal). These are two different people who deal with things differently. Tarek, with his childishness and his refusal to accept the norm, mirrors Soraya’s refusal to accept what is deemed ordinary. Tarek also has the rebellious side that echoes Shadi’s personality in Wajib. Ghaydaa, meanwhile, is a single mother who doesn’t have the freedom to behave as she wishes because she is a woman, a mother, and because of the time period [the late 1960s]. Eventually, she learns from Tarek a sense of defiance and a will to freedom. Ghaydaa is the one that propels Tarek forward for once at the end of the film. 

In Wajib, the same interpersonal relationship plays out between Shadi (Saleh Bakri) and his father, Abu Shadi (Mohammad Bakri). Shadi is full of anger and criticism, but his anger really comes from his deep love for Palestine. As for Abu Shadi, he is a survivor and he has to learn to care for his city, Nazareth, and his people in very different ways. 

I think these tensions between the dual characters play out even at the level of cinematography, not just scriptwriting. The last scene of Wajib, with Shadi and Abu Shadi, is totally framed around the logic of yin-yang. Shadi arrives, enters the house, makes coffee, then sits outside. Then we see, from the reverse, Abu Shadi joins his son outside, and they are complete. They become one. 

NF: You’ve worked with Saleh Bakri on all of your feature films. It’s rare to find actors that you want to keep working with and it’s also unique, because with every film you’re both growing and changing. What do you enjoy about working with him and what has it been like to work with him over so many years?

AJ: I cast Saleh in his first film. It was also my first feature. Ever since then we have worked together. He’s also my friend, my neighbor, and my partner in crime. We’ve grown up together too. We’ve helped each other move houses, plant gardens, protest together, welcome children into this world, and really fight for a place to make art. We live in the same city, Haifa, a city that is ours and at the same time a place that battles our very existence.

NF: Directing is a very nurturing job. You are a mother, and motherhood changes everything about you. How has becoming a mother changed how you make films? 

AJ: To be a working parent in this industry is one of the toughest things I’ve ever encountered. Being able to devote yourself and care to another being at the same time and making films is such a challenge. There’s no leaving work or leaving your family. You do both all the time. Any filmmaker that is a parent has one of the biggest challenges of all. Bigger than financing your films, bigger than anything, is trying to do both. It’s very, very difficult. I don’t think this is something that filmmakers who are not raising children can easily understand. 

NF: You’re in the midst of editing your next feature film, Palestine 36. What’s the film about and how is it coming together? 

AJ: It’s an epic film set in the 1930s in Palestine under the British Mandate. This is the biggest project of my life. We were supposed to start shooting in October 2023, and after October 7th we had to evacuate the whole cast and crew. We lost all our locations, and everything we had been preparing to shoot for about 10 months had to be shut down. We spent the last year and a half trying to complete the film, stop-starting production and being very stubborn-minded. We managed to finally film everything—some of it shot in Palestine, a miracle in itself—but the cast and crew came together and really made something incredible happen.