Spoiler warning: This review contains spoilers for “All That’s Left of You.”
“All That’s Left of You,” written and directed by Palestinian American filmmaker Cherien Dabis, has broken into the mainstream in a way few Palestinian-directed films have. Executive produced by Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem, the film chronicles the multigenerational story of a Palestinian family forcibly displaced from Jaffa during the 1948 Nakba and their lives in the occupied West Bank in the subsequent decades. What begins as a historically faithful, if cautious, retelling of exile and occupation ultimately becomes a portrait of Palestinian identity that is miserable and traumatic, but also strikingly unsure of itself.
Dabis’ film contains three acts: the first set in Jaffa in 1948, the second in the West Bank in 1978, and the third in 1988 at the height of the first intifada, bookended by a brief prologue and epilogue. The opening is surprisingly melodramatic, beginning with teenagers Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) and Malek (Rida Suleiman) chasing each other through the streets of the West Bank in 1988. As Noor chants and raises his fist at a protest, shots ring out, the music swells and the scene slips briefly into slow motion. It’s heavy-handed and openly sentimental, but not disastrously so — the kind of emotional shorthand that signals the film’s intentions early and clearly.
The film’s retelling of the Nakba feels oddly romanticized, though that tone is partly justified by its focus on the forced displacement of an urban, middle-class Palestinian family from Jaffa. Sharif (Adam Bakri) lives with his wife and children, including his son Salim (Salah El Din). As Zionist militia quickly take control of Jaffa and surrounding Palestinian villages, Sharif is imprisoned, dragged across his own orange grove and separated from his family for what seems to be months.
“All That’s Left of You” shines in how it portrays the family’s exile in the occupied West Bank. In the second act, Salim is older, now played by Saleh Bakri, and his relationship with his son, a much younger Noor (Sanad Alkabareti), is layered and quietly devastating. Through brief encounters with Israeli forces in the street and discrete political conversations at home, their relationship offers a thoughtful examination of masculinity and fatherhood under occupation. Noor’s resilience in the face of this reality gives the act its emotional center, and Alkabareti’s performance grounds the film at a moment when it risks slipping back into abstraction.
Also noteworthy in this act is the presence of the celebrated and late Palestinian actor and filmmaker Mohammad Bakri — father to Adam and Saleh Bakri — who plays an older Sharif. He dreams obsessively of returning to the family’s once-renowned orange groves in Jaffa, speaking openly about decolonization while Salim pleads with his father to stop reminiscing. Here, Dabis presents Palestinian national identity with post-colonial nuance and a daring subtlety that resists both pandering and preaching.
As the narrative progresses, it is revealed that Noor was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier and rushed to a hospital after the protest at the start of the film. After days of exhausting interviews, Salim and Hanan secure a permit to travel and admit Noor to a hospital in Haifa — only to learn hours later that he is brain dead. Initially, the film seems poised to bring its ideas into focus. Through Salim and Noor, Dabis gestures toward and at times fully embodies the Palestinian concept of sumud, or steadfastness.
But the film’s final third repeatedly undercuts itself through conflicting character and narrative choices. A hospital worker soon enters and begins to float the possibility of organ donation, mildly implying that it would go to Israeli patients. Salim refuses outright, articulating a clear and principled rejection of lending even symbolic legitimacy to the system that killed his son. Hanan, by contrast, is positioned as the empathetic moral center, suggesting that Noor’s death might “mean something” if his organs are used to save other people. They consult a local sheikh, or Muslim leader, who offers the advice: “Your humanity is also resistance.”
The moment is riddled with contradiction and feels carefully calibrated to liberal sensibilities. In reframing Palestinian womanhood as boundless empathy and moral generosity, the film dilutes the fierceness, steadfastness and political clarity it elsewhere associates with sumud. In doing so, Salim and Hanan arrive at a decision that Noor — whose anger, resolve and refusal to accommodate the occupation was carefully established — would almost certainly have rejected.
The film closes with a brief epilogue set in 2022, in which an older Hanan finishes recounting her life story to Ari (Dominik Maringer), an Israeli man in his thirties who received Noor’s heart. The resulting exchange about identity and empathy is blunt and on-the-nose, collapsing any ambiguity or nuance. The film feels uncertain about what it wants to say and unwilling to sit with its own consequences. By this point, I found myself emotionally checked out, no longer invested in the characters and increasingly distracted by an intrusive score and uninspired camerawork.
“All That’s Left of You” is ultimately a Palestinian film that engages with themes of exile and return reminiscent of Ghassan Kanafani’s renowned books “Men in the Sun” and “Returning to Haifa,” which emphasize mobility and fragmentation. Unlike those works, or films like “The Dupes” or “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” Dabis’ film often feels uncertain of its own direction. Films like this are undeniably important, especially for reaching wider audiences and uplifting Palestinian narratives, even when I don’t fully connect with every choice on display. Yet, between its muddled messaging and uneven execution, the film left me wishing for something bolder and more assured.
“All That’s Left of You” is playing at the Angelika Film Center and other select theaters.
Contact Yezen Saadah at [email protected].