Cherien Dabis’s drama, spanning nearly 75 years in one Palestinian family, is a heart-wrenching, if sometimes blunt, portrait of displacement… The framing for this Arabic-language family saga, spanning from 1948 to the near-present, evinces the film’s primary modes – lived-in, propulsive, multifaceted drama with a fraught, ardent sense of place, and heart-on-its-sleeve, direct plea for recognition.
All That’s Left of You, Palestinian American film-maker Cherien Dabis’s wrenching portrait of intergenerational trauma, begins its 75-year tale of displacement as the great epics do, in medias res.
A teenage boy chases a friend through the narrow streets of Nablus, a blur of surefooted youth amid the sun-bleached, nobly dilapidated homes. In a series of kinetic, precise shots, Dabis sketches a vibrant map of the occupied West Bank in the late 80s, where humiliation and hope coexist in a dangerous pressure cooker. Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) bounds from an auntie’s kitchen to a bustling fruit market to a protest against Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint; he summarily joins the chant of intifada (“uprising”). Then, the soldiers open fire.
Cut to an aged Dabis as Noor’s mother Hanan, speaking to camera: “You don’t know very much about us. It’s OK, I’m not here to blame you, I’m here to tell you who is my son. But for you to understand, I must tell you what happened to his grandfather.”
The framing for this Arabic-language family saga, spanning from 1948 to the near-present, evinces the film’s primary modes – lived-in, propulsive, multifaceted drama with a fraught, ardent sense of place, and heart-on-its-sleeve, direct plea for recognition.
The former is more effective than the latter, the foibles of specific people being generally more compelling than straight-up messaging, no matter how right or relevant. (The film was in pre-production in Palestine during the 7 October attacks and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, forcing filming to relocate from Jericho to Cyprus and Greece.)…
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/25/all-thats-left-of-you-review
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