While the Palestinian struggle is no stranger to the big screen, Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left Of You separates itself from its peers through sheer scale, enveloping the entire history of Israeli occupation from 1948 to 2023 (it was written before October 7th and started filming in the early weeks of the genocide). It’s a grand sweep, one that impresses in its ambition but also comes a little undone when trying to dive deep into the raw emotions of the piece, the filmmaking and acting much more muted than its historical epic status might imply, which becomes a tough ask across a long, near 150-minute runtime.
Dabis splits her tale of a Palestinian family in the West Bank into three generational segments, starting in 1948 during the Nakba, then moving on to the ‘70s and ‘80s as the grown-up children of the first section try to bring up their own kids during an era of still violent but also more bureaucratic repression, before ending in the present. The first section is definitely the strongest, as brave-yet-naïve patriarch Sharif (Adam Bakri) tries to defend his family’s lovely home and orange orchard from the encroaching Zionist forces, only to be met with the foul violence of a history that’s already been decided.
There’s a real tragedy here, as characters reiterate hopes for a future that we know will never come, but even in this more potent and ideologically clear-cut first third, there is an odd quietude to proceedings, moments that should land like a hammer blow instead feeling like pulled punches. It’s all in unimpeachably good taste and there is something to admire in Dabis’s restraint and trust in her audience but, for one of the great moral travesties of our time, head-nodding agreeability maybe doesn’t grant All That’s Left Of You the power it should have.
As we get closer to the present day, meeting Sharif’s now grown-up son Salim (Saleh Bakri) and his wife Hanan (Dabis herself, playing key roles both behind and in front of the camera) and their own children, Dabis gives us thornier moral conundrums, testing her characters without judging them. As the Israeli bureaucracy and humiliations take hold and the whole idea of Palestinian statehood gets further away, Dabis gradually starts sapping colours from the frame, a subtle effect initially but eventually contrasting the gloriously colourful and vibrant pre-Nakba world in 1948 with the gloomier present in a powerful way.
A filmmaker of Palestinian heritage being given the time and money to make such a grand-yet-intimate drama of Palestinian history does make All That’s Left Of You feel like an important part of 2025’s cinematic landscape. Yet, importance doesn’t automatically equal greatness, Dabis’s film sometimes moving and fascinating but also, just as frequently, underpowered in its execution, always maintaining an immersive cultural specificity without ever quite landing the devastating emotional hit this story deserves.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 