All That's Left of You Review: The Domino Effect of the Occupation on One Palestinian Family in Aching Detail

6 days ago 12

Gregory Nussen is the Lead Film Critic for Screen Rant. They have previously written for Deadline Hollywood, Slant Magazine, Backstage and Salon. Other bylines: In Review Online, Vague Visages, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Servant, The Harbour Journal, Boing Boing Knock-LA & IfNotNow's Medium. They were the recipient of the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Graduate Prize in Criticism, and are a proud member of GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. They co-host the Great British Baking Podcast. Gregory also has a robust performance career: their most recent solo performance, QFWFQ, was nominated for five awards, winning Best Solo Theatre at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2025.

One of the reasons the ongoing crisis in Palestine has so captured the public imagination is its evergreen immediacy. The Nakba, or the forced displacement of native Palestinians (and the subsequent establishment of the modern state of Israel, in 1948) is still so recent that there are scores of elders who still have the keys to the homes and the deeds of their previous, now stolen, land. That painful history is alive each day, and in Cherien Dabis' generation-spanning family drama All That's Left of You, it is rendered in heartbreaking detail. Most remarkable of the film's achievements is its cogency: despite how intimate its narrative is, it is able to collapse time and space to lay out in painstaking detail the domino effect of state-sanctioned violence, and how it inevitably, irrevocably, bleeds into the domestic space.

Cherien Dabis' Approach is Refreshingly Direct and Surprisingly Hopeful

All That's Left of You documents, in linear fashion, the long-term effects of European colonialism and the Zionist occupation. Vulnerably performed and gorgeously shot, the film starts in 1948 and ends in 2022, a portrayal of generational trauma made indelible by the casting of brothers Adam and Saleh Bakri, alongside their father, actor and filmmaker Mohammad Bakri, who recently passed in December 2025 (Bakri's own film, the 2002 documentary Jenin, Jenin was banned in Israel).

All That's Left of You centers around three generations of one family, whose moderately comfortable lives are upended when the British mandate refuses to uphold a promise to protect Palestinians from European settlers. Sharif (Adam Bakri) naively assumes that they will be able to continue their lives in peace, even as shelling intensifies around them. Sharif's children are, like everyone else's, barred from attending school in person in 1948, but his youngest son, Salim (Salah El Din) takes well to at-home poetry lessons, as the family tends to their orange grove in Jaffa.

As the situation gets worse, families begin to evacuate the area — forcibly, in most cases — and some 750,000 would end up being expelled. "Do you know where I'm going to take you after this is all done," he asks his wife, Munira (Maria Zreik). "To the cinema." A simple fantasy of escape, which is immediately interrupted by shrapnel making its way into their living room. After much hesitation, Sharif relents to the pressure to send his family to relative safety in the West Bank, as he is forced to join a labor camp. The air is thick with irony.

In the heartbeat of the film is a potent question: is it better to go to an early grave having battled to the end, or to take your lumps where you must in order to live a long life?

Some thirty years later, young Salim has grown into a schoolteacher (Saleh Bakri), living with his wife, Hanan (Dabis) and their young son, Noor (Sanad Alkabareti), in a cramped, shanty apartment a far cry from the opulence of his childhood home. Sharif (Mohammad Bakri), now an old, wisecracking man with a fading memory, curses at the news reports and suggests that his people have lost their fighting edge. But this home is still as warm and as idyllic as their Jaffa house, in its own way, with Hanan carefully caring for their chickens and Sharif cultivating a special connection with his grandson.

This section, set in the late 70s, is the film's longest, and Dabis uses it as a philosophical anchor point. As Salim begs his father to forget the injustices of the past so that they might live peacefully in the present, his son grows ashamed of his father's inability, or unwillingness, to meet Zionist soldiers with force. In the heartbeat of the film is a potent question: is it better to go to an early grave having battled to the end, or to take your lumps where you must in order to live a long life? As one imam puts it in the film, "your humanity is also your resistence," but Dabis knows just how fickle that definition of humanity can be.

After a tragic incident forces the family into a moral quandary that would make any parent shudder, Salim and Hanan become emblematic of a rare kind of grace. It is to Dabis's credit as a writer that the characters feel so magnetically personal yet simultaneously able to stand in for an entire population whose shot at dignity is perpetually threatened.

All That's Left of You is Jordan's official, shortlisted entry for the 2026 Oscars, joining Palestine '36, The Voice of Hind Rajab and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk in a bevy of wildly diverse films dealing with Palestinian history both past and present. On its surface, it is probably the most narratively conventional of the group, even more so than Palestine '36, since it is less intentional as subversion. In its first act at least, it is more didactic and educational in its protest, as if it has an uninitiated audience member in mind. This is most seen in one of the film's first moments, as an elderly Hanan addresses the camera, saying:

"I know you're wondering why we are here. You don't know very much about us."

That directness is not a bad thing. Dabis wants us to understand the domino effect of occupation and subjugation in all of its myriad ways; the film cannot be faulted for demonstrating such violence in an easily understood manner, when popular narratives erase certain histories in real time. When Sharif's doctor tells Salim that it might be a gift his father is losing his memory, he's wrong. That's the job of the occupier, to make those holding the memories feel like their stories don't matter. Dabis wants us to know that's all we have left.