Back to selection
Inherited Histories: Cherien Dabis on All That’s Left of You
All That's Left of You (courtesy of Watermelon Pictures and Visibility Films) Few films arrive with the urgency and necessity of Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, a work that positions itself as both historical epic and intimate confession. Emerging from the long shadow of displacement and erasure, it stands as one of the most vital contributions to Palestinian cinema in recent memory. Told through the voice of Hanan (played with piercing restraint by Dabis herself), the story begins with her son Noor, a teenager shot during a protest in the occupied West Bank, before spiraling outward to a multigenerational saga of exile, endurance and return.
While Dabis’s Amreeka (2009) examined being Arab in America, and May in the Summer (2013) explored being American in the Middle East, her latest turns toward the root: being Palestinian in Palestine. Here, shifting borders are not abstractions but lived realities, shaping identity through loss, resilience and survival. And if the earlier films captured the merging—and often clashing—of two distinct worlds, this one stitches its intergenerational saga into the fabric of national history. It is a deeply compelling odyssey of Palestinian identity at its major flashpoints of the twentieth century, beginning with the Nakba, the 1948 catastrophe that expelled nearly 750,000 from their homes and bleeds into the present day.
Dabis builds history through texture: a wedding that spills into the street, a humiliating checkpoint encounter, a son branding his father a coward. These intimate details accumulate into collective memory. Central to its singularity is the casting of the Bakri family dynasty of Palestinian actors—Mohammad alongside his sons Saleh and Adam—embodying grandfather, father and son across eras. The film’s final act may strike some as provocative, or undeserving, but its friction binds the film to its title: what survives are fragments, shards of grief, love and refusal. In this way, All That’s Left of You becomes a tale of sovereignty and sacrifice, a miraculous feat within a cinematic canon long shaped by erasure.
I met Cherien Dabis the afternoon after All That’s Left of You’s Sundance 2025 world premiere, when the first waves of audience reaction were still reverberating. Nearly seven months later, I caught up with her again to continue this interview over the phone, just after she won Best Film and Best Screenplay at the 8th annual Malaysia International Film Festival. The Dabis I encountered then was strikingly different from the woman I met at Park City—tempered by months of festival play and stalled distribution deals, yet sharpened by a virtuous indignation at an American film industry whose risk aversion remains entangled with anti-Palestinian racism. Our conversation turned to her process and what it takes to bridge the personal and the political. All That’s Left of You will be co-released this fall by Watermelon Pictures and Dabis’s new production and distribution company, Visibility Films.
Filmmaker: It’s been 12 years since your last feature film, May in the Summer, and 16 years since your debut, Amreeka. You’ve been honing your craft in between with television directorial credits on shows like Ramy and Only Murders in the Building to eventually make what I consider your magnum opus. What was that first spark that led to All That’s Left of You? Was it an image or a story that set off a lightbulb moment?
Dabis: When I was prepping Amreeka, I shot the first 20 minutes in the West Bank, Ramallah and Bethlehem mostly. One time, I went from Ramallah to Jerusalem to pick up my rental car, and when I was driving back through the checkpoint, the soldiers were like, “It’s dangerous, don’t go.” I [said], “I’m staying there, I have to go. This is where I’m from.” And they were like, “OK, go at your own risk.” I kept driving, and saw that there was black smoke everywhere, then fires and tires, and then a lot of Palestinians, mostly young men. I realized I was driving through the middle of a protest that had just begun, and crowds of people were marching toward the checkpoint. Behind my car were Palestinian young men standing before a row of soldiers with their machine guns poised. I was literally in the line of fire—I still see it in slow motion in my mind. Cars started honking at me to go, but I was just paralyzed. Finally, when I came out of that moment and realized people are honking at me and I need to drive, I left. Of course, I felt guilty that I was driving away and wanted to go back to see what happened.
That moment stayed with me so strongly—who are those young Palestinian men looking down the barrel of those guns, and what are their stories? The very first image that I got was of the bullet—one of these young men at a protest, there’s gunfire, a bullet, you don’t know if he gets hit or not, then we cut to the face of an old woman.
Filmmaker: Your script is centered around major political benchmarks in Palestinian history—the Nakba, then the First Intifada and so on. In terms of building the story and characters, what was your writing process?
Dabis: I knew the beginning of the film and that this old woman, who we’re going to learn is that kid’s mother many decades later, is going to tell us the story. So, I knew the structure before I really knew what was going to happen. The story is, how did this teenager end up in a refugee camp and at this protest, in front of this bullet in this refugee camp at this moment in time? I wanted to also explore the passage of trauma, and how sometimes the trauma of 1948 skips a generation, because it was something that I saw in my own family, and something that I see in many Palestinian families. You have the generation of the Intifada, [who are] really, really rebellious—young people who were like, “This must change.” And I wanted to focus the story of the family on the lived experiences of the fathers and sons, so I started to think: what is the event that changes the relationship between father, son and family members in each of these different time periods? And when I focused on that, it became very clear to me where I needed to go.
Filmmaker: Without revealing too much, I have to ask about this sort of “Sophie’s Choice” that happens late in the film. Some viewers might think of it as a thoughtful, poignant turn, while others might have some critiques about abandoning the characters’ militarism. What is your response to that? What was it about that [particular] choice that was so critical for the film?
Dabis: I really wanted to take the movie to a symbolic place so that we could talk about something that we don’t talk about, which is that at this point, the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined. Their suffering is intertwined. Their safety is intertwined. We are bound up with each other. And I wanted to be able to say something that one of the characters says in the film, which is that we, the Palestinian people, have suffered tremendously as a result of Jewish persecution. I wanted to be able to explore that in a way, and to push that envelope and the choice that this family makes so that we could explore something that I don’t feel we’re talking about, but I think is necessary to talk about.
The Palestinian people have tremendous humanity. They have shown it again and again, and the world just ignores it and chooses to represent Palestinians in such a dangerous way. I wanted to honor people who have been so patient and resilient and loving. I think that the choice that they make in the movie is really a beautiful one. I think Palestinian people would absolutely make that choice. I also wanted to highlight that the vast majority of Palestinian people, despite what they’ve been through, do not have hate in their hearts, and that needs to be seen, to be acknowledged. I feel like it’s so important to show how much the Palestinian people do lead with their humanity. What they’re fighting is oppression. I knew it would be potentially controversial, but I welcome the conversation around it. That’s part of the point of the film, right?
Filmmaker: In early October 2023, just days before filming was set to begin in the West Bank, the production had to completely shift course due to the Israeli military invasion of Gaza. After years of preparing to shoot in Palestine with local crews, sets and a story rooted in that landscape—everything shifted. What was that experience like for you, and how did you navigate that moment on the personal and the professional side as the director, screenwriter and one of the lead actors?
Dabis: It was definitely one of the biggest challenges of my life, both professionally and personally. My foreign crew had literally just landed. I had been on the ground prepping with the local crew for five months. [The film was] years in the making as far as writing and finding the right collaborators, always knowing that I wanted to shoot in Palestine to keep it grounded and authentic.
When things started to go down in the area, we had just finished our tech recce. We were planning to shoot all over the country, from the West Bank, Jericho and Nablus to Israel proper: Yafa, Tel Aviv and Haifa. So, we spent three days traveling the country, going around the shooting locations and walking through all of our shooting plans, and finished that work on October 5th, 2023. On October 7, we were all a little bit in denial about what happened, what the repercussions would be and how we would be impacted. It quickly became clear, within a few days, that we weren’t going to be able to shoot as planned. My foreign crew, especially the ones who had just landed, were like, “I got to go. My family’s worried sick about me.” We were hearing fighter jets overhead, and some of my crew was swearing they could feel the earth shaking from bombs. And at some point, when the rumor started that they were going to seal off the borders and we were going to be stuck in the West Bank, I realized, “I’ve got to get everyone out safely.” My own family started to get really concerned, so we started to evacuate people.
I was a little bit in denial for such a time because I thought, “We’ll be able to come back, surely. Maybe we go shoot Cyprus first?” We were planning always to shoot about 90 percent of the movie in Palestine and 10 percent in Cyprus, in order to take advantage of the tax credits, but also to shoot some scenes that would be too difficult to shoot in Palestine, like big historic crowd scenes, things that we didn’t want to risk shooting [in occupied Palestinian territories] for fear of getting shut down.
Leaving Palestine was just devastating. We had a huge crew on the ground there that we had to leave behind, and we didn’t know what would happen to them or if we would be able to come back and work with them. And they were devastated to see us go because we were a source of income, and now their lives were very uncertain. That was really the hardest part.
We ended up going from Cyprus to Jordan, where we shot, I’d say, about 50 percent of the film. The remaining 20 to 25 percent that we couldn’t find in Cyprus or Jordan we ended up shooting in Greece, both in Athens and on Rhodes. [The film was] supposed to finish in December of 2023 but was finally finished in October of 2024. It was a process of starting and stopping, and every time we stopped, I didn’t know if we’d have the money to continue, and I didn’t know if I had the energy to continue. I had to keep digging deep. Seeing what was happening in Palestine, of course, was just fueling my need to continue and get the movie done and out into the world sooner rather than later. That was the thing that really kept me going.
Filmmaker: In terms of the filmmaking, what sort of prep do you do with your departments? Do you do rehearsals?
Dabis: Yeah, we did a lot of prep. My DP [Christopher Aoun] and I spent a lot of hours together. Before we started official prep together, we went through every scene in the script and talked about it from an emotional and visual point of view. We chose the color palette of every time period and communicated that to everyone. We did photo boards of every scene from every location. The challenge was, how do we make each of these time periods visually distinct but make the film feel like a whole, like it’s a film? It’s not episodes of television, you know? The visual style has to really coalesce overall, but we wanted each time period to feel distinct, and to do that with color, camera movement, texture and set dressing. So, we shot with the same camera and lenses and kept the overall look of the film pretty uniform, but made distinct choices about the color palette and the way the camera [moves] during each time period.
Filmmaker: Did you do acting rehearsals, as well?
Dabis: Yeah, I spent a lot of time with the actors, especially the kids, most of whom are Palestinian and live in Palestine. We rehearsed, we played a lot and I got to know them really well. I think working with kids is so much about finding the right kid for the part, then making them comfortable and, sometimes, leading them to the emotional place they have to go to. Sometimes, you have to go there first; you want them to be emotional, [so] you have to go up to them and show them that it’s OK to be emotional. Sometimes, I would model the behavior that I wanted just to give them permission to go there. Sometimes, I had their parents help. The kid who plays young Salim in 1948, his mom was amazing at helping me. She would go up to him and say, “Hey, remember when grandpa died, and how he felt?” Sometimes, her giving him permission to go there was what was needed. Other kids, it’s the opposite—if their parents are nearby, they can’t let go. You have to get to know the kid and understand who they are and what they need, and whether it’s good for them to have their parents there or not. And sometimes, kids get self-conscious with the camera, and you have to say, “We’re not recording right now, we’re just doing a rehearsal. We’re just gonna play.” Sometimes, you have to improvise and kind of trick them. It was amazing to watch them become actors.
Filmmaker: I do want to pause and just highlight this immense challenge you took on and the day-to-day demands that you had. How did you decompress when you would put your head down at night?
Dabis: I really had to take radical care of myself because I think I worked non-stop for almost two years and was really getting burnt out. A meditation practice and practicing qigong almost every day are just two things that helped me stay healthy mentally, physically and spiritually.
Filmmaker: What was it like to package such a sweeping historical epic to funders? What kinds of support or creative partnerships proved essential to bringing it to life?
Dabis: On the financing side, I have really been tremendously fortunate. We found a great deal of European public support, Middle Eastern funds, private equity and donors. Our initial budget actually came together relatively quickly compared to my previous films. Thank God, something was easy, [but] after we had to flee Palestine and raise more money, that was definitely more challenging. I felt like I had tapped out my resources, and I had to meet some new people and rely on people to introduce me to people. It took a great deal of effort to tap into a new community of financiers and pitch what I was doing and what had happened. There were so many moments when I just thought the movie was done, and then at the final hour, we would get what we needed. I almost felt like my ancestors were looking out for me, to be honest; it really felt almost like there was some kind of divine intervention.
Filmmaker: You’ve now entered into the distribution cycle of the film, and it’s proven to be difficult. What do you think those gaps are? How do you see this difference from your first film versus now your third? How has the landscape changed?
Dabis: I don’t think that much has changed. My first film [Amreeka] also did not get mainstream distribution. It was in U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance. It went on to win an award at Cannes. It was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards, and the best we got was a boutique, first-time fiction distributor in National Geographic. So, sadly, I would say not much has changed for Palestinian films. If you look at the history of Palestinian cinema, not a single Palestinian film has ever gotten a mainstream distributor, with the exception of Paradise Now (2005), which was Warner Independent, [but they] folded a few years later. But I think for this film, a lot of us had high hopes. There are many things about this film that people say are like a Hollywood epic, and I was hoping that that would work in our favor. I honestly don’t even really know what it is. Is it that they’re not in touch with audiences? Is it that they’re so rigid in what they think will make money? Is it that they’re so risk averse that they don’t want to spend money on an Arabic-language film because those have historically not made money? But they’ve also historically not made money because no one will take a risk on those films!
I know that they’re risk-averse because it’s a Palestinian story. At least two distributors actually said those words, and I’m sure many others thought it. I mean, I literally had someone say that my movies [are] not even worth as much as No Other Land (2024), because No Other Land had an Israeli filmmaker [Yuval Abraham] at the center of it. This has always been the landscape, on some level, for Palestinian cinema, but things have gotten much worse. [Distributors are] fearful. They don’t think the numbers make sense, and they don’t think our films are worth that much, and that’s been explicitly stated.
Filmmaker: I really appreciate your candor because the film does resonate. It’s very clear and coherent.
Dabis: It’s a very emotional story about a family surviving decades of political upheaval. It’s about their love and resilience and what has kept them alive through all of it. It’s not a political film, but what’s so sad is that Hollywood cinema and television [has] dehumanized Arabs and Muslims for going on a century, and they are still refusing to even help show our humanity through art, through our own authentic storytelling. At this point, I’m kind of like, why not burn all the bridges? None of them were real anyway. Just burn them down and build authentic ones. A24 will release a movie like Warfare but won’t release a movie told by an Arab about the Iraqi side of what that war did to the Iraqi people. It’s such a tough pill to swallow. I’m looking at Hollywood, going, “You are accountable. You need to be held accountable for our dehumanization, yet you refuse to even pick up our films that actually show and celebrate our humanity.” I don’t understand it. The films that Hollywood will pick up about us are the ones [with] Arabs looking at [us] and criticizing our own society and culture, ones that play into Western stereotypes. So, if you have an Arab filmmaker who’s making a movie about Saddam Hussein being a dictator, that’s a movie that a Hollywood company wants to pick up because it plays into exactly what everyone believes already.
Filmmaker: I do believe Hollywood has blood on their hands. The camera has been used as a tool to dehumanize many, specifically Muslims, Arabs, Indigenous and Black peoples. Now, the camera is being used as a tool to livestream a genocide, and still they do nothing about it. I think it shocks the elite to see millions believing in a free Palestine. That’s scary for them, so they want to hold on to whatever little last breaths of power that they have, including withholding Palestinian films.
Dabis: This is what I mean by distributors not being in touch with audiences, because look at how many people are so upset about what’s happening. Look at how many millions of people have gone out into the streets to march, whether in London or New York or Sydney. In the [United States], I’ve been able to figure out distribution, I’ve created my own distribution company [and] partnered with Watermelon Pictures. I’m a big part of the release of the film, and that’s because I want to learn the distribution side and figure out the future of film distribution because I don’t think that the current distribution companies are necessarily doing that, and certainly not for me, so why not just be at the forefront of how I can do it for myself and help lead other filmmakers? At this point, I feel like it’s the only way for filmmakers like me. There are so many people who would really want to see this film, and I want to give them the opportunity to see it.
Filmmaker: Since our last conversation [at Sundance 2025], the situation in Gaza has only grown more urgent. Has that shifted how you consider All That’s Left of You’s role as a piece of art and activation for audiences?
Dabis: Everything shifted in October 2023 in the way that I thought about this film because I realized how much more urgent it was, how much more vital it was that the film get out into the world and be seen in a really big way.
The film really does speak for itself. The reactions that I’ve gotten have sometimes shocked me, even [a] self-proclaimed Zionist coming up to me and saying, “I had no idea, I didn’t know.” [They were] very emotional after watching the movie—it was amazing to have a real bonding moment with someone who was perhaps skeptical going in and came out impacted. But it’s such a bummer to me that [since] we raced to get the film done for Sundance in January, that it has taken so long to figure out the distribution of it all in the United States. But it is getting a release. It’s opening in late September in Italy, then in October in Benelux and Switzerland, then November in Germany. Germany was the first territory we sold, and we’ve sold to many great distributors all over the world. How much can art directly impact what we’re seeing happen? I honestly don’t know.
What more do we expect Palestinians to do? We have to recognize what happened in 1948 in order to get anywhere. We have to recognize the next bit. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 must be recognized, and we have to recognize Palestinian suffering. [This] cannot be normalized to this level where we’re watching this grotesque, horrific violence unfold in real time on our screens and be like, “Oh, it’s always been like that.” I hope that the movie can really kind of wake people up and show people the humanity that has always been there.
Filmmaker: Do you have a message for Hollywood or distributors who have seen the film but passed on it?
Dabis: It’s not just Hollywood. We’ve not been picked up in the U.K. We’ve not been picked up in Australia. It’s the [entire] English language territory. I knew that Hollywood was risk averse. I just didn’t realize how absolutely cowardly distributors are, and that’s disappointing on a level that literally makes me question whether I want to continue to be a part of this industry. Again, that’s why I’m creating my own [distribution] banner. I don’t know if I see myself ever being a part of this industry in the way that I thought I would be. I really have a value system that is important to me, and I don’t know that I want to work with people who don’t. There are good people, and I know that there’s a lot of fear, but when you see the level of violence that we’re seeing unfold in Gaza, it’s hard to continue to have sympathy for people who are full of fear—fear of speaking up or of supporting a story that is not even political, and also supporting a filmmaker who told the gentlest version of the story possible.
I’m really shocked and disappointed in Hollywood, to be honest. When I was a teenager, I told my dad I wanted to be a filmmaker, and my dad said, “You can’t be a filmmaker, you’re Palestinian. No one will care what you have to say.” I really wanted him to be wrong, and sadly, I think he’s not.
