Palestine 36, Dr Biju’s Papa Buka reveal how stories of the marginalised and wronged are interconnected

During the opening ceremony of the 30th IFFK on December 12, Canadian filmmaker Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, who was bestowed with the festival’s prestigious Spirit of Cinema Award, said, “The injustice towards one community is an injustice against all communities.” Thus, one can also say that the stories of the marginalised and the wronged are, in a sense, interconnected. Even amid vast differences in culture, lived experience, and the atrocities and injustices the people faced, their resistance mirrors one another. Papa Buka also makes this case. Despite being an established historian, Anand Kunjiraman (Prakash Bare) continues to face discrimination. He is certain that no matter how much he soars in his career, he will still be looked down upon by the lesser-achieved elites as a person belonging to a “so-called” backward community. And people belonging to marginalised communities worldwide experience the same in their respective environments.

Despite being completely different in terms of the places they are set in, the lives and incidents they explore, treatment, and narrative style, among others, there are factors that link Papa Buka to director Annemarie Jacir’s historical drama Palestine 36, which was screened at the 30th IFFK as the opening film. Both of them portray how indigenous communities have often been, throughout history, invaded, forced into exile, and even subjected to ethnic cleansing in/directly by their oppressors. Nonetheless, the movies are also about their resistance and how they managed to preserve what’s theirs amid attempts to ensure their complete erasure. They are, in a way, anti-war films that reveal how commoners end up being the ultimate victims of any battle that governments wage against each other. While history textbooks and media narratives about Palestine and PNG are often crafted from an Occidental point of view and hence reek of an elite gaze, both Palestine 36 and Papa Buka are stories about the respective indigenes, set in their terrain, and revolve around characters with lived experiences of what is portrayed.

Set against the backdrop of the 1936 Arab revolt against British colonial rule in Palestine, Annemarie Jacir’s film sheds light on the life and history of a populace that the global mainstream media has tirelessly sought to overlook. Yet, without succumbing to extreme cinematic manipulations for dramatic effect, Jacir has astoundingly documented a dark chapter in history. What makes Palestine 36 a brilliant work is the way the writer-director has struck the right balance between portraying both the atrocities faced by the Palestinians and their resistance against the British administration and Zionism. Neither does she depict her people as just victims or hardline revolutionaries. Instead, the historical drama seeks to document what the Palestinian Arabs were subjected to and their responses to it. The movie also beautifully offers a 360-degree view of 1930s Palestine and the lives of the indigenous people before they were displaced and rendered invisible.

At the same time, what makes Palestine 36 even more intriguing is how it doesn’t present the events as a religious conflict between Jews and Muslims. Jacir ensures that the movie doesn’t offer such an angle, and nowhere do we witness such suggestions. Instead, she portrays it as the struggle of the indigenes to hold onto their land, and against the coloniser’s attempts to dispossess them and offer it to immigrants for selfish strategic reasons. While addressing the opening ceremony of the 30th IFFK, Abdullah M Abu Shawesh, Ambassador of the State of Palestine to India, had also slammed the United Kingdom (UK), stating that it was the British who planted the seeds of “Palestinian misery.” Annemarie Jacir presents this more incisively.

There is a powerful scene towards the end of Palestine 36 when a woman named Khuloud Atef (Yasmine Al Massri), who used to write under a pen name in support of the revolt, gives back her wedding ring to her husband, who jumped ship and became a tool in the hands of the British. By doing so, she makes her position very clear. Through a simple yet profoundly powerful gesture, Khuloud asserts her stance, affirming that traitors have no place in her heart. She then joins the street procession. The image and message Jacir conveys are profoundly moving. Without shedding a drop of blood, she delivers a massive blow to the Judases who betray their own people for thirty pieces of silver.

In a later conversation, Shawesh also pointed out that just as Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh was branded a terrorist by the British, all those who resist occupation are similarly portrayed as terrorists today. “India’s freedom struggle reflects the present plight of Palestine,” he affirmed. Not only India’s freedom struggle, but also the discrimination and atrocities faced by marginalised communities — particularly Bahujans — as well as the historic displacement of Adivasis, share spiritual similarities with the Palestinian experience. Papa Buka shows that this was the reality for PNG people as well. During World War II, they were even forced by the colonisers to go to battle on their behalf as combatants, and that too in a fight that had nothing to do with them. Not just PNG’s indigenous people, but even Indian soldiers, brought in by the British Army, had to go through the same ordeal, and many of them were killed on the battlefield. Such similarities connect the stories of the oppressed, no matter which part of the world they belong to.

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Yet, at a time when movies are becoming increasingly violent, almost to the level of “the more the gore, the merrier,” both Palestine 36 and Papa Buka refrain from such portrayals. Although Palestine 36 does show visuals of the revolt and the British Army’s atrocities against Palestinians to some extent, it doesn’t delve into graphic depictions. This is particularly significant since mainstream movies, especially war films and so-called spy actioners that revolve around the tensions between two countries, tend to include graphic bloodbaths and torture scenes under the guise of “honest portrayal.” Filmmakers often disregard the concept of subtlety, showcasing in detail all the brutal ways in which certain countries mistreated the people and soldiers of the other side. What the audience — who find a sense of voyeuristic satisfaction as well as a renewed hatred for the “enemies” by watching this — fails to consider is how sickeningly unfair it is to showcase publicly the miseries of those who suffered. Knowing that extreme violent portrayals sell tickets, bloodthirsty and money-hungry filmmakers and production companies insert them into their movies, raking in crores by exploiting the miseries of martyrs and further inflaming the naive among the audience. Can these audience members actually harm the enemies? No. Instead, at least some of them, assuming that they are somehow exacting revenge for the martyrs, target people within their own country who resemble the so-called enemies — often those of the same religion that the rivals belong to — and inflict torture upon them, deriving sadistic pleasure. This is evident even in India.

It is against this backdrop, with such movies becoming more frequent, that anti-war films like Papa Buka and Palestine 36 assume greater significance. Even while depicting the realities faced by their respective indigenous peoples and the historical atrocities they endured, neither of the films spews hate toward enemies or commoners belonging to opposing countries and communities. Such levels of responsible filmmaking are essential in today’s world.