DAN WEBSTER:
Most of us are well aware of how and when Israel was founded. It’s been well documented over the decades not just in history books but in news reports, magazine articles, novels and films… not to mention, in this era of social-media influencing, having been the focus of so much contradictory and fiery online punditry.
Only relatively recently has any real attention been given to the people who were displaced by the birth of a Jewish homeland—people we know as Palestinians who were forced to give up their long-held homes as international agreements played out following World War II.
No Other Land, for example, is a Palestinian-Israeli co-production that won the 2024 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It details how even today Palestinian villages are being uprooted to make way either for Israeli army purposes or to make room for Israeli settlers. Sometimes both.
In her narrative feature All That’s Left of You, the Palestinian-American filmmaker Cherien Dabis takes a more historic view. She bridges nearly three quarters of a century, from 1948 with the ongoing conflicts involving the building of the Israeli state through the second decade of the 21st century. In doing so, she centers on three Palestinian men and their families.
Her approach is to begin in 1988, during what is known as the First Intifada—a revolt by Palestinians against the Israeli military that began the year before. Two young men are caught in a street demonstration, and what happens to one of them sets everything in motion.
Because we then are introduced to a woman (played by writer-director Dabis herself) speaking directly to us—but more likely to someone in particular. And she insists on telling the story of her son. But first, she says, she has to begin with her son’s grandfather.
And so we are thrown back 40 years, when an orange-grove owner named Sharif (played by Adam Bakri) is trying to live a normal life with his family even as war erupts all around them. As the situation grows progressively worse, Sharif sends his family away and soon he is arrested and thrown into a work camp.
Then time shifts ahead three decades, and Sharif (now an old man played by Mohammad Shakri), is living with his youngest son, Salim (a schoolteacher played by Saleh Bakri) and his family. As residents of the West Bank, they are subject to ever-changing Israeli decrees. And one day, returning home shortly after a military curfew has been declared, Salim is humiliated by Israeli soldiers in front of his son Noor (played by Sanad Alkabareti).
A decade later, Noor (now played by Muhammad Abed Elrahman) is now a teenager who is not above showing off to the neighborhood girls. But, too, he has become radicalized—his worldview having been shaped both by his father’s shame and his grandfather’s still-simmering anger.
It is that worldview that leads to the aforementioned street incident. What follows makes up the film’s penultimate section, featuring Salim and his wife Hanan, the woman telling the story of her son. Both struggle with Israeli bureaucracy and then have to make a decision—not to mention confront the kind of grief—that no parents should ever have to endure.
What Dabis puts on the screen is powerful, not just in the message she wants to convey but in how her cast brings it to life. Dabis proves to be both an astute filmmaker and a riveting screen presence. As Salim, Saleh Bakri channels powerfully the degradation that his character has long experienced.
What’s clear by now is that little about the complicated events regarding the Middle East, past or present, can be captured completely in two and a half hours of film. But the individual stories of those living through the land’s history, both Jewish and Palestinian, need to keep being told.
In doing her part, credit Dabis for ending her film with an epilogue—one that offers at least a sense of acceptance and hope to a situation that, in the real world, seems impossibly difficult to realize.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.
