Palestinian American filmmaker Cherien Dabis’s all-too-human film, All That’s Left of You, is an epic microcosm that encapsulates the history of Palestine from 1948 to 2022. The writer, director, and actress dramatizes the experiences of a persecuted class of people over the course of seventy-five years, through the lens of a single Palestinian family.
The award-winning 146-minute film, Jordan’s official submission to the Motion Picture Academy for Best International Feature Film, opens with a title screen in Arabic and English stating “Based on historical events.” It is about two mischievous teenaged students, Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) and Malek (Rida Suleiman), who are swept up in a demonstration in the Occupied West Bank in 1988. The protesters wave clenched fists and the then-banned Palestinian flag while chanting “Intifada.” As they march toward Israeli soldiers, gunshots ring out. A close-up of a bullet hole in the windshield of a parked car into which Noor has ducked for cover fills the screen, symbolically evoking a spiderweb.
Then Noor’s mother, the elderly Hanan (played by Dabis) suddenly appears. “I’m not here to blame you,” she says, looking into the camera. “I’m here to tell you who is my son. But for you to understand, I must tell you about his grandfather.” The fluid film cuts again to an aerial shot swooping forward from the sea toward an ancient port city with another title screen: “Jaffa, Palestine 1948.”
The tangled web of the family’s intergenerational odyssey begins in their ancestral home, set amid orange groves, as the British colonial authorities withdraw at the end of the British Mandate, which took place amid the establishment of Israel, known as the Nakba, during which Palestinians were violently displaced from their land. In the film, the middle-aged, middle class father, Sharif (Adam Bakri), tries to reassure his wife (Maria Zreik) and three children that they will be safe. But as the days pass, the Israeli bombardment falls closer to their house, which is soon seized by the Zionists as Sharif (played by Adam Bakri) is imprisoned and the family—like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—are expelled from their homeland.
The movie next takes us to the 1970s, to a wedding ceremony for the older Sharif’s (now played by Mohammad Bakri, a top Palestinian thespian who died December 24, 2025 shortly after the filming) grown daughter, Layla (Hayat Abu Samra), in the West Bank, where the exiled family now lives. The widowed Sharif resides in an apartment in a refugee camp with his adult son Salim (Saleh Bakri, the offscreen son of his film father), a schoolteacher, his wife Hanan, and their six-year-old son Noor. (Intriguingly, Adam Bakri, who is also Mohammad Bakri’s son, portrays Sharif as a young man.)
All That’s Left of You depicts the grinding reality of daily life for Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, under the iron heel of the State of Israel. In one sequence, Salim, accompanied by his son, is caught after curfew as he endeavors to obtain Sharif’s prescription drugs at a nearby pharmacy. In a scene that is painful to watch, malicious, capricious Israeli soldiers humiliate the bookish educator in front of Noor.
Here, Dabis may be influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon, the Black psychiatrist from Martinique who wrote about how colonialism affected the mental health of Arabs and others in Algeria and elsewhere. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers’ debasement of Salim leads to a rupture of the close father-son bond he’d previously enjoyed with Noor, as well as to Salim’s own self-loathing.
The film flashes forward ten years, to when the now-sixteen-year-old Noor joins an Intifada demonstration in 1988. When Israeli soldiers open fire on the Palestinian protesters, he seeks refuge in a parked car, where he is hit in the head by the bullet fired through the windshield depicted in the opening scenes. Upon learning her son has been shot, Hanan dashes through the streets exclaiming, “Oh, my God! Noor, my heart!” The wounded teenager is taken to a West Bank hospital, which doesn’t have the technical expertise to save him.
After Noor dies, an Israeli hospital staffer asks his parents if they want to donate his organs. This at first outrages them, but after meeting with an imam to discuss the ethical and religious implications, they decide to do so. The bereaved parents have one demand: that whoever receives Noor’s organs be informed about who he was.
Again the film flashes forward, this time to 2022, as the now-elderly Salim and Hanan journey back to their homeland. Viewers finally learn what became of Noor’s donated heart.
All That’s Left of You pulls no punches; it presents a Palestinian point of view without cartoonishly vilifying Israelis as bad guys. Dabis paints a compelling portrait of Palestinians, who insist upon persisting and existing, as the decades pass.
The daughter of a refugee, Dabis is a Palestinian-American who was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in Ohio. She first traveled to the West Bank when she was eight years old, witnessing the indignities of life under occupation. This is what inspired her to make this feature, as she explains in the film’s press notes: “I wanted to attempt to heal myself and my community through storytelling. I wanted to increase the world’s empathy for people who have endured so much.”
The film opens theatrically on January 9.