She says that, as a child, in a school performance she had to play a mother who had just lost her daughter. Neither by age nor by experience, whether in life or on stage, such a serious role suited him. But he did it. «I was very impressed that right at the end I looked at the audience and saw my mother and a good part of my family... and everyone was crying. Being able to make someone feel something so deep and inexplicable was a revelation to me. I don't know if that was what led me to be an actress, but I do know that that is my first memory of being an actress. And my first success,” says Hiam Abbass and laughs.
The speaker looks like a woman, a woman like any other, and in truth, it is a myth. Woman and myth. Contemporary cinema in any of its forms passes through the small body and the enthusiastic and fast diction of this actress born in Palestine 65 years ago. From the latest version of Blade Runner, by Dennis Villeneuve, to The Limits of Control, by Jim Jarmusch, through The Lemon Trees, by Eran Riklis, without forgetting either the Succession series (the cruel and lucid genius of Marcia Roy is unavoidable) or her role under Spielberg in Munich, there is no filmmaker who, like his family in that first performance, has not given up and been moved by his work. «I understand my job as a way to access other worlds. My Palestinian identity is closely linked to my global cinematic identity. My identity is not exclusive, but the other way around: I am Palestinian by virtue of being a citizen of the world. Wherever I am, Palestine always calls me,” he comments.
The billboards now present one of his latest works, Palestine 36. The film signed by Annemarie Jacir joins a recent wave of anxiety, let's call it that, to know the roots of a people, the meaning of suffering, of which works such as The Voice of Hind, by Kaouther Ben Hania, or Everything We Were, by Cherien Dabis, are also a part. «Sometimes you have to explain it. But the history of the Palestinian people did not begin on October 7 as it seems from certain news reports. Everything comes from before and it is important to know the role played by the United Kingdom in the great injustice that persecutes Palestine. Before being massacred by the State of Israel, the Palestinian people were massacred by the British. And that is important to know and I have the impression that people want to know it because they simply do not understand the genocide that they have been contemplating live for years," she says to situate the film and place herself within it.
Palestine 36 tells the story of two families during the year indicated in the title, when Palestine ceased to be a British colony. On the one hand, the family that lives in a town watches, half astonished and only helpless, at the dispossession of their lands as the Jewish settlers flee persecution and European anti-Semitism. On the other hand, the family that lives in the city dreams of the possibility of their own and even shared state in the face of the freedom that is approaching. The film is arranged (or disordered) around apparently unconnected fragments of lives: an idealistic journalist, a chauffeur in love, a brutal repressor... And so on until, carefully, at a distance from both the epic and the victimhood, everything coincides in a single instant; a moment of truth and suffering.
