Screening at the Asian World Film Festival in Culver City on Sunday, November 16, was All That’s Left Behind (Jordan, 2025) – Cherien Dabis’s drama spanning nearly 75 years in one Palestinian family. This film is a heart-wrenching, if sometimes blunt, portrait of displacement, was an award-winning of Sundance 2025. All That’s Left of You unfolds primarily in three chapters across generations of a Palestinian family. It opens in 1988 as protests lead to violence before cutting back to 1948 to really make clear how this family got to this point. In the earlier timeline, an Israeli soldier shoots a young man named Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman). Before we learn his fate, Dabis is on-screen, playing both Noor’s mother and herself as she speaks directly to the camera about the familial decision and international politics that led to this day. Financed in part by Jordan, it is Jordan’s submission for Best International Feature Film for consideration at the 2025 Academy Awards.
A teenage boy chases a friend through the narrow streets of Nablus, a blur of surefooted youth amid the sun-bleached, nobly dilapidated homes. In a series of kinetic, precise shots, Dabis sketches a vibrant map of the occupied West Bank in the late 80s, where humiliation and hope coexist in a dangerous pressure cooker. Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) bounds from an auntie’s kitchen to a bustling fruit market to a protest against Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint; he summarily joins the chant of intifada (“uprising”). Then, the soldiers open fire.
Cut to an aged Dabis herself as Noor’s mother Hanan, speaking to camera: “You don’t know very much about us. It’s OK, 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.” The framing for this Arabic-language family saga, spanning from 1948 to the near-present, evinces the film’s primary modes – lived-in, propulsive, multifaceted drama with a fraught, ardent sense of place, and heart-on-its-sleeve, direct plea for recognition.
Then the film cuts back to Noor’s grandfather Sharif (Adam Bakri) in 1948 in Jaffa, trying to live peacefully in a region torn apart by violence. When he is arrested just for being on his own land after the British withdrawal from the region, it sends ripples through his family tree.
The second chapter details Sharif’s son Salim (Saleh Bakri, in an impressive performance) and an encounter with an Israeli soldier who nearly kills the man in front of his son, Noor. This event seems to harden Noor, making him grow up too quickly. The arrest of Sharif shaped the life of Salim in a way that made him fearful, which then altered the trajectory of Noor, leading to his shooting. How that event will end up actually saving lives gives Dabis’ film a bittersweet edge.
The former is more effective than the latter, the foibles of specific people being generally more compelling than straight-up messaging, no matter how right or relevant. (The film was in pre-production in Palestine during the 7 October attacks and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, forcing filming to relocate from Jericho to Cyprus and Greece.) Dabis nevertheless makes the key point of returning to the original trauma for Palestinians: The 1948 Nakba, or the forced removal of around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs by Zionist paramilitaries, with the help of the colonial British, for the formation of the state of Israel.
In the first section of the film, Noor’s grandparents Sharif (Adam Bakri) and Munira (Maria Zreik) lose their stately home and family orange grove in Jaffa and Sharif spends a year in a prison camp. At the time, Britain had some 48,000 soldiers in Palestine at the time of the Nakba under the British mandate and the massacre at Deir Yassin, the reports of which frightened Sharif’s young son Salim.
But as the years go by and the trauma of Palestinian displacement festers, the film grows into something thornier, but deeply moving. Older now and working as a teacher in a West Bank Palestinian school in Nablus, Salim insists that his father let go of the past. However, the elderly Sharif insists that young Noor understand the Palestinian cause. After that humiliating episode with Israeli soldiers in his own Palestinian town, Salim has to deal with his young son’s anger about what he considers to be Salim’s cowardliness. Noor insists that his father should fight back against the occupying Israelis.
Nearly half of the film’s 145-minute runtime elapses before we return to the teenage Noor’s injury during the First Intifada, which prompts a deadly bureaucratic nightmare, a family reckoning, unimaginable decisions and reminders of common and complicated humanity, all expertly and understatedly rendered by Dabis (playing Haman) and Saleh Bakri. The second part of the film opens with a wedding in a West Bank village but that limited joy is sooner eclipsed by the cruel realities of Israeli occupation. This part of the film clarifies how trauma calcifies into resentment, how much is worth fighting for, the obligations of family safety versus morality, the responsibilities of those who leave and those who stay. When a boy experiences the state-enforced, routine humiliation of his father, there is no question about why the next generation of Palestinians would deal with their hatred of the Israeli Occupation. The director makes us see how oppression fractures faith into recriminations among each other. And yet life goes on, despite it all.
The third part of the film brings us forward to a later time when we watch Salim and Hanan make some very difficult and heart-breaking decisions in life and the difficulty of living under Israeli occupation. We also see how they work past the idea of retribution and find hope in some of the best humanist values that Islam can support. It comes as a bit of a surprise that at the end of the film, the aging couple return to Jaffa as Canadian citizens, having obviously emigrated at some point. Salim’s father’s house in Jaffa is still standing in the old part of the city.
