Cherien Dabis at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “All That’s Left of You” at Eccles Theatre on January 25, 2025 in Park City, UT. (Photo by George Pimental/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Shelby Shaw
Cherien Dabis — writer, director, and star of All That’s Left of You (اللي باقي منك) — walks on stage to a standing ovation for her post-premiere Q&A on January 25 at Eccles Theatre. The applause and hollers refuse to cease, not letting Dabis get any words in other than “Thank you” and “I love you,” which causes the cheers to amp back up. “I’m so moved,” she says, struggling to form her next sentence. “You’re going to have to give me a moment to collect my thoughts.” To help, her costar Maria Zreik, born to Palestinian parents, joins her on stage.
“The film is inspired in part by my family. My father is a Palestinian refugee who lived most of his life in exile,” Dabis explains. Growing up in the diaspora, but going back and forth from America to the West Bank where her father grew up, gave Dabis the opportunity to see firsthand what kind of oppression was happening: her father, stopped at borders and checkpoints, humiliated in front of her. “My first memory of traveling to Palestine, actually, was when I was eight years old, and we were held at the border between Jordan and the West Bank for 12 hours. The contents of our suitcases were picked through, the soldiers ordered all of us to be strip-searched, including my baby sisters age three and one, and my father, who was humiliated, confronted the soldiers and they screamed at him,” she recounts bravely into the microphone in front of the packed audience. “I have a memory of really thinking that they were going to kill him. So obviously, the humiliation scene in the film is somewhat inspired by what I saw.”
All That’s Left of You (اللي باقي منك) is a multigenerational and timely epic, a powerful history in the Premieres section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, of one family spanning from 1948 to 2022. Chronicling their determination to keep peace and stay together amid unexpected occupations, attacks, and evacuations, this powerfully moving saga stars Dabis as Hanan, wife to Salim (Saleh Bakri), the middle generation of a fictionalized Palestinian family. Although each of the three sons acts out against his father in childhood at one point or another, we also watch each grow up and start a family of his own. Then they begin to learn that having to fight against oppression is continuously inherited. Dabis’s film is an entrancing and heartbreaking narrative that leads to the present day, acting as a bridge between the news barrage modern viewers are accustomed to now, and the peace and flourishing that once was found without having to keep an eye over one’s shoulder for gun-toting soldiers in the background.
“We’ve never seen urban life in Palestine in 1948,” Dabis says, on being particular about the multinational locations where they shot. Principal photography for the film took 11 months to complete due to all the starts and stops that were unexpectedly thrown into the production schedule. “It was really important for me to show that cinematically. I wanted to show what Jaffa looked like: it was the center of Palestinian cultural and economic life.”
Opening with the occupied West Bank in 1988, a Palestinian boy is shot while protesting Israeli soldiers. His mother (Dabis) breaks the fourth wall as she addresses us that she will tell us the history that has led to that moment, taking us back, to start, to the Arab-Israeli War, which was the final phase of the Palestine War, in 1948. Living well in a large house on their orange grove’s property in Jaffa, Palestine, a family of intellectuals and creatives adapts to life under suspicious threat from the Israeli forces that are appearing more frequently. Out of fear, they try to flee. The orange grove is taken, and the family is split up. Jaffa, they are told, is now an Israeli city. Two years later, it is unified with Tel Aviv. Today, the area is a mixed city of Jews and, to a lesser degree, Arabs. But Dabis’ story hasn’t gotten to today yet at this point in the film.
1978. The family’s young boy, Salim, is now a grown man with his own growing family, including his son, Noor, and his father who endured the earlier war, Sharif. Curfews are put into effect for the Palestinians, and then removed, then enacted again. There is a constant presence of soldiers and an unpredictable sound of gunshots. When walking home with young Noor one day, Salim is stopped and gravely humiliated in front of his son, forced to say disgraceful things about their family in order to appease the soldier who threatens to shoot both of them, keeping his gun aimed at their close-range faces the whole time. Noor, however, is disgraced by his father’s submission. Thinking him a coward, without considering the real danger of the situation, he holds a child’s grudge that only grows with him as the years pass by.
1988. Now an angsty teenager, Noor tries to enjoy his time while school has been shut down, drinking soda and wooing girls through the alley windows of their secret schoolrooms. It is here that the story we were first introduced to, in the opening scene of the film, finally catches up to the narrative. It is now that the protest against Israeli forces happens. It is this moment in which a gun will fire and hit an innocent teenager. How, the film asks, did we get here?
From this point in time until 2022, we watch as Hanan and Salim are required to reckon with the very forces that have wrought hardship and tragedy upon three generations of their family and their home. They are made to make peace and accept history, yet they are determined to find justice and recognition in exchange. But the world is a damning place where irony and strangers and war don’t need to care about anyone else’s story. Dabis, with her incredible performance, writing, and directing of Palestinian life under occupation in All That’s Left of You, has created an intergenerational monument of a film to witness collective trauma and, one hopes, healing.
“I wanted to make a movie that would honor my father and Palestinians like my father, who became refugees and who lived this experience,” Dabis says after the premiere, “by telling the story of how Palestinians became refugees. And telling the Palestinian origin story because it’s virtually missing from the mainstream narrative.” With All That’s Left of You, Dabis’ epic and personally intimate work makes a powerful mark that won’t easily be forgotten.
