All That’s Left of You

Saturday March 8 @ 7pm

Drama / History
Not Rated – 2hr 25min

A deeply moving, multigenerational drama, All That’s Left of You follows a Palestinian teenager who gets swept into a protest in the Occupied West Bank and experiences a moment of violence that rocks his family. The film unfolds as his mother recounts the political and emotional threads that led to that fateful moment. Spanning seven decades, the film traces the hopes and heartaches of one uprooted family, bearing witness to the scars of dispossession and the enduring legacy of survival.

An epic-scale journey into the depths of the Palestinian plight, masterfully tracing and carefully dissecting a multifactorial and convoluted intergenerational trauma. Starting in medias res, in a setting of pulsating action and anguish that leaves a tormenting question unresolved, we are plunged (and swept) from the get-go into a story of undulating pain and a recurring sense of futility. Divided into four chapters – the surge of violence during the Nakba in 1948; the consolidation of a new status quo in the West Bank in 1978; the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1988; and the filmic present of 2022 – Cherien Dabis’s devastating All That’s Left of You makes us both witnesses and participants in a fathomless and irreparable loss. Yet Dabis resists the lure of convenient sentimentality, weaving instead a labyrinthine character study, shrouding a series of underground and catastrophic conflicts within the bounds of family. In a meticulously paced yet heart-wrenching finale that imparts a bitter aftertaste of unfinished repatriation and existential uprooting, life and hope emerge as the sole bulwark against inhumanity and dehumanization.

According to the director, Cherien Dabis, an Palestinian American filmmaker All That’s Left of You isn’t political in its approach. Its deeply personal and profoundly intimate. A historical epic that chronicles the story of the land through the eyes of one family and three generations of struggle. A family portrait, examining the relationship between grandfather, father and son, and the legacy of trauma passed down to each. It’s a drama with piercing moments of joy, love and humour that keep it from becoming too hard to watch.

Played perceptively by Dabis, Hanan takes us into the story, looking at someone we can’t yet see and pledging to share her son’s story with them. “I’m here to tell you who my son is,” she says, signaling that the film will be one long flashback leading up to this moment and a reveal of the mystery listener. Hanan starts not with her son Noor, however, but with Noor’s grandfather Sharif (Adam Bakri) living in the Jaffa of 1948, the year of the Arab-Israeli war. A worldly, poetry-loving man, Sharif and his family endure bombings and cheat death daily in their beautifully appointed home surrounded by an orange grove. But the family — which includes Sharif’s son Salim — eventually gets displaced, with their home and orange grove destroyed. After a period in a refugee camp, with Israeli soldiers deeming land deeds invalid, the narrative jumps to 1978, to a territory populated by Palestinians crammed in modest quarters, without citrus trees and with regular curfews.

The last year and a half — with Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the most recent round of ceasefire negotiations — has revived conversations about the plight of Palestinian people across the globe. These discussions have been bolstered by a handful of recent documentaries like Watermelon Pictures’ From Ground Zero and the now Oscar-nominated (and still undistributed in the U.S.) film No Other Land. The former provides a relatively real-time record of Gaza’s destruction while the latter chronicles the methods Israel uses to encroach on the West Bank.

Dabis’ thoughtful feature complements these striking works by offering accessible historical context and an emotional portrait of survival. Although All That’s Left of You stumbles in its last act, ambling toward a conclusion reached more sharply earlier on, the delicate and compassionate performances Dabis pulls from her cast keep us invested in this multigenerational story.

Every so often, a movie comes along that shatters your heart while trying ever so delicately to piece it back together. All That’s Left of You is one such film. It captures the pain felt by generations of people, balanced with the beauty of familial love. This lengthy epic earns every minute of its runtime. Dabis accomplishes an impressive feat both in front of and behind the camera, handling a multi-generational story with care. What we’re left with is distinguished storytelling that feels timeless.