After a screening of “All That’s Left of You” at Sundance, Cherien Dabis recalled part of her inspiration for making it, one of her earliest memories of seeing a family member embarrassed at a security checkpoint in Palestine and unable to make sense of it as a child. You wouldn’t need to hear the writer/director acknowledge something like this really happened when arguably the most powerful scene in her extraordinary third feature is so vividly built around a similar idea as the prepubescent Noor is helpless to do much of anything as Israeli soldiers stop his father Selim in the street, taking a minor infraction of running late against the curfew imposed on the Palestine community living under occupation in 1978 and turning it into a potential capital offense as they point a gun at his head and force him to call the boy’s mother a whore. The scene is horrific on its own, showing the impunity of the military to entertain themselves with the suffering of those they preside over, but Dabis picks up on the potentially even more devastating aftermath when Selim is no longer seen with any authority by his son, but instead a coward who deferred to his bullies rather than take them in even though it protected himself and his family from certain death.
It’s been over a decade since Dabis last directed a feature and seeing “All That’s Left of You,” you’re assured it wasn’t wasted time as she takes on her most ambitious film to date, starting out in Jaffa in 1948 when it was still under Palestine control and ending in 2022 when it is considered part of Israel. The film may seem like a departure from the seriocomic tone that Dabis has specialized in with her previous films “Amreeka” and “May in the Summer” where families were upended by a desire to adapt to a new world around them while some clung tightly onto tradition, but the filmmaker’s ability to create clans that remain tight-knit despite all their differences as their individual members grow into their own people is a major strength as she charts the way one family is nearly undone by a desire to stay on the land where they have roots.
It’s a bit unnerving but entirely appropriate that Dabis essentially breaks the fourth wall to start out “All That’s Left of You,” speaking directly to camera in character as Hanah, the mother of Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman, in his teenage years) as one wonders about his health, introduced moments earlier running wild in the streets on his way to a protest before gunfire breaks out. To understand why her son was at the protest on the West Bank, she explains, you have to know about his grandfather Sharif (Adam Bakri in his early life, Mohammad Bakri in later life) and while it isn’t the most elegant way into a flashback to 1948 from 1988, the personal and confrontational framing serves the story well as history unfolds from a Palestinian perspective that has rarely made it onto the big screen and never so well-produced and tender as it is here. Starting out on Sharif’s home in Jaffa where his family eats under a chandelier and has a bountiful orange grove outside, the bombing from the war begun by the plans for a partition between Palestine and the recently created Israel has gotten closer than the patriarch had expected, leading the family to separate as his wife takes the kids, including a young Selim to seek safety. They end up in a refugee camp, as does Sharif after he’s left with a handful of others in Jaffa to negotiate the city’s surrender to Israeli forces, and even after reuniting with his loved ones, it could be argued they never are truly close to one another again.
By 1978, Selim (Saleh Bakri) has married Noor and responsible for taking care of Sharif, who no longer hides his bitterness about being displaced in his old age, once doing so for the sake of his family, and Selim can be seen trying to do the same for his as he is more than happy to have his young son Noor bond with his grandfather, but careful about picking up his attitude about Israelis when he holds out hope that things will change for the better. The tragedy throughout “All That’s Left of You” is how each generation of the family is disabused of any conciliatory ideas they may naturally be inclined towards as the constant threat of violence takes its toll and the dinner table arguments set off by the stress are more than enough to destroy families without any bullets ever coming their way. Noor‘s eventual estrangement with his father becomes a more extreme version of the space that grows between Selim and Sharif, and with time, Dabis powerfully presents the reverberations of displacement as it breaks up even the closest of family and friends.
This idea of separation is taken to increasingly extreme lengths in “All That’s Left of You” as Noor’s health situation worsens, but you’re more than willing to go with it when Dabis so ably outlines an unthinkable situation for the family to endure in the first place and ultimately arrives at a deeply moving conclusion. Not only is the director able to elicit big emotions, but handles the demands of such a large-scale undertaking with considerable grace as there’s a real elegance to the passage of time. Still, Dabis has found a way to speak to this specific moment as well as transcend it with the remarkable family drama, turning a deep sense of loss into something tremendously meaningful.
“All That’s Left of You” does not yet have U.S. distribution.