This week, in the midst of a fragile ceasefire, 300,000 Palestinians have returned to northern Gaza. Even as their former homes have largely been reduced to rubble, the persistence of the people to remain on their land is both admirable and heartbreaking.
But that fortitude is borne from decades of forced displacement and violence which has spanned across generations of Palestinian families. The accumulated hard truths of life under occupation are explored in Cherien Dabis’ blunt yet necessary All That’s Left of You. The epic drama is an ambitious and affecting look at one family fractured by tragedy and united by an enduring love for each other and their homeland.
The sprawling narrative — stretching nearly two-and-a-half-hours — moves back and forth across four time periods (1948, 1978, 1988, and 2002) but is rooted in a single, shattering event. In 1988, teenage Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) turns down a street only to find himself in the midst of an impromptu protest against Israeli soldiers. The demonstration turns violent, Noor is shot, and his mother Hanan (Dabis) rolls back the calendar to the 1948 Nakba and unthreads the stories of his grandfather Sharif (Adam Bakri) and father Salim (Saleh Bakri), what they endured, and how the past has shaped the family’s present.
Penned by Dabis, who also co-leads the picture in addition to directing, the filmmaker’s handling of the timelines is assured, and her grip on the messaging clear but never didactic. The film’s surface storytelling evocatively renders the stifling realities of living in an apartheid state, but it’s the psychological suffering that is most vivid. The burden of bureaucracy — whether its obtaining the right paperwork to receive life-saving healthcare or the requirements needed to simply travel to and from Israel — is measured in all its inhumane absurdity. However, just as harrowing as death are the humiliations that test the dignity of Hanan’s family. A sequence in which Noor’s father Salim is forced at gunpoint to defame his wife in front of his son by Israeli soldiers for safe passage to their home that is only steps away is a moment as life-altering as receiving a bullet.
If the film’s visuals from director of photography Christopher Aoun occasionally feel too polished and glossy, the movie remains grounded in Dabis’ unshakeable pursuit of personal reckoning. The filmmaker grapples with a Palestine that is no longer free, its culture stolen, its people continually pushed by force to the edge of their emotional and physical limits. That anger and pain lives like a raw nerve in All That’s Left of You. The film doesn’t require technical audacity when it so vulnerably and meaningfully wrestles with the anguish of a nation and contemplates what form dissent can take in the future.
Surprisingly, after so much despair, Dabis manages to find a sliver of hope and understanding, a way of navigating what’s to come. “Your humanity is also your resistance,” Noor softly tells Salim as they visit Tel Aviv at the story’s close. After enduring having his home stolen, imprisonment, and no shortage of indignities, it’s all he can do not to leave Israel immediately. But it’s here that Noor acknowledges a somewhat bitter irony: that even as Palestinians face one hardship after another, they are expected to respond with grace. That as Salim learns his childhood city has been diminished and its neighborhood turned into shops and tourist stalls he must act with more civility than is afforded him.
As of publication, over 47,300 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023. And in tracing Palestine’s history near to the current moment, we leave All That’s Left Of You with the understanding that the trauma of a nation is far from over.
Director, screenplay: Cherien Dabis
Cast: Saleh Bakri, Cherien Dabis, Adam Bakri, Maria Zreik, Mohammad Bakri, Muhammad Abed Elrahman
Producers: Thanassis Karathanos, Cherien Dabis, Martin Hampel, Karim Amer
Cinematography: Christopher Aoun
Production design: Bashar Hassuneh
Costume design: Zeina Soufan
Editing: Tina Baz
Music: Amine Bouhafa
Sound: Paul Rischer
Production companies: Pallas Film (Germany), Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion (Germany), Displaced Pictures (State of Palestine), Nooraluna Productions
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
In Arabic, English
145 minutes