‘All That’s Left of You’ Review: Cherien Dabis’ Drama of Palestinian Origin and Struggle is a Generational Touchstone [A]
It’s hard to describe the momentousness of Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You in a way that captures it with the justice it deserves. For the average cinephile, this film may be described as a haunting and poignant intergenerational drama, but to Palestinians like myself, this film is so much more than that. Not only is it a cinematic masterpiece that deserves your attention, it is a groundbreaking moment for Palestinian storytelling that asks viewers to contemplate the ways they’ve been lied to for decades.
All That’s Left of You is Dabis’ third feature film, and was shortlisted for the 2026 Oscars as Jordan’s Academy Award submission for Best International Feature. It follows the history of one Palestinian family, starting with their expulsion from their home in historic Palestine in 1948, through the ongoing violence and oppression they faced in the West Bank in 1988, all the way to today’s colonization of the hometown they were forced to flee. In following this singular family through decades of injustice, Dabis achieves something so rarely done in such a short amount of time: She depicts the lived experience of the average Palestinian family — an experience of displacement, heartbreak, and grief that follows you around for generations.
There’s a beauty in the way that All That’s Left of You chooses to take audiences through this family’s journey, because it’s not as simple as linear storytelling. We’re first introduced to this family not in 1948, but in 1988, when the First Intifada has already begun, and we see Noor (Sanad Alkabarete) and his friend eager to participate in protests against the Israeli army’s illegal occupation of the West Bank. Chaos ensues quickly in the first few minutes of the film, and Noor is hit by a bullet not long after joining the protests. But before we get to see what happens to him, we see his mother, Hanan (Dabis), in modern day, speaking directly to the camera. “I know you are wondering why we are here,” she remarks. “You don’t know very much about us; it’s okay, 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.”
By starting this film with the First Intifada in 1988, taking us to modern day, and then telling us that in order to understand, we first must know what happened in 1948, Dabis reminds audiences that everything that we experience as Palestinians today is contingent on what happened to our parents and our grandparents. The violence you see us face, the protests you see us attend, it all started because in 1948 our families were forced out of their homes by violent militias who wanted our land. With this, Dabis brilliantly underscores the importance of history that society is so used to forgetting.
So, we’re taken through a journey of meeting Noor’s father, Salim, when he was a boy in 1948. His father, Sharif (Adam Bakri), makes the difficult decision to send his family away from the house in Jaffa (current day Tel Aviv) after Zionist militias have taken over the land, and claimed it as newly-created Israel. Thinking this is temporary, Sharif stays to guard the house only to get put into a concentration camp by militiamen, released only after experiencing a heart attack from being put to work in such horrific conditions. After seeing his father be so brutally beaten and run down, it’s no wonder that when we see adult Salim (Saleh Bakri) again in 1978 with 7 year old Noor, he’s keen on doing what he can to keep him and his family safe.
Salim grows up in the shadow of trauma that shaped his father’s entire life, and his instinct is survival. While Sharif carries the rage of someone who remembers the land that was stolen from him, Salim carries a quiet exhaustion of someone who spent his entire life living under occupation. Salim’s priority is keeping his family alive and avoiding the attention of Israeli soldiers whenever possible, even if that means demeaning yourself at the request of the occupation that controls your land.
But Noor grows up witnessing his father capitulate to men who don’t belong, and this leaves a huge mark. One of the film’s most powerful moments occurs when Noor and Salim are stopped by Israeli soldiers after curfew while trying to retrieve medicine for the elder Sharif (the late Mohammad Bakri). At gunpoint, Salim is forced to demean himself and his wife to appease the soldiers. Noor watches in stunned silence behind his father, absorbing both the cruelty of the soldiers, and the helplessness of the father who was supposed to protect him.
That moment plants a seed that will define Noor’s future, and leads to what the film begins with. What Salim sees as survival, Noor sees as surrender. And by the time the First Intifada begins years later, Noor belongs to a generation of Palestinians who refuse to inherit their parents’ silence. When we return to 1988 and see him running through the streets to join the protests, it becomes clear that the bullet that eventually strikes him did not begin with that moment in the street — it began decades earlier, when his family was first forced from their home in 1948.
When I say All That’s Left of You is groundbreaking for Palestinians, I say it with my chest. This isn’t just a film about three generations of struggle, it’s a film that provides audiences a window into a world they have been shut out of through decades of censorship and propaganda. For years, the entertainment industry refused to shine a light onto the Palestinian experience because in daring to humanize the families that got kicked out of their homes, we also dare to question the systems that allowed such mass displacement to happen in the first place.
The colonization of Palestine was allowed to happen because phrases like “a land without a people, for a people without a land” spread through Zionist circles and planted this idea that there was no one to displace. But if you stop for a moment to look at the photographs from 1948, or watch films like All That’s Left of You, you’ll see the lines of thousands of civilians being forced to evacuate from their homes (like we saw Palestinians in Gaza being forced to do over the last two years). All That’s Left of You doesn’t just show us what actually happened in history, it makes us confront the history books that have lied to us all these years.
This film marks the beginning of a new era of storytelling — an era where Palestinians finally have control over the narrative, and a chance to tell our stories at a scale we have never been afforded before. At last, the stories of our parents and our grandparents will be given the stage they deserve, and for the first time in years I have hope that the world will finally understand what it is like to be Palestinian.
Grade: A
All That’s Left of You is currently in select theaters from Watermelon Pictures and available to purchase VOD on Apple, Letterboxd and more.
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