When “All That’s Left of You” begins, we’re immediately off to the races. A percussive, driving score follows two teen boys — one named Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) — racing through the streets of the West Bank in 1988 during the First Intifada, or uprising. The moment is filled with glee, the boys leaping over rooftops and chasing each other with abandon until they happen upon a protest against the Israeli occupation.
Noor’s friend wants to go home, but Noor has no love for the Israeli forces. He needles his friend (“Are you scared?”), and joins up with the other marchers. Moments later, shots ring out. Noor tries to duck into a car parked on the side of the road just as an IDF bullet shatters the glass windshield. Director Cherien Dabis leaves you hanging on this harrowing moment, the camera peering out through the broken glass. We suddenly switch to Noor’s mother, Hanan (played by Dabis), staring down the barrel of the camera. To understand her son, she says, you have to first understand his grandfather.
“All That’s Left of You” is a sweeping epic spanning roughly 80 years of one Palestinian family’s existence, starting with the mass expulsion of Palestinians from what is now Israel in 1948. The film seamlessly cuts back and forth between Noor, his father Salim, and his grandfather Sharif at different points in their lives. There’s a familial aspect to the casting here as well — Adam Bakri plays Sharif as a young man while his father, the late Mohammad Bakri, plays him as an older man. Adam’s brother Saleh Bakri plays Sharif.
Dabis centers her story of Palestinian resistance on the story of these three men — son, father, and grandfather — and the different ways in which they experience the occupation and how they choose to respond. “All That’s Left of You” mines the lineage of this family in all its hurt and joy with the knowledge that we can’t understand anything — not hate, nor power, nor love, nor ourselves — in a vacuum.
Dabis tells the story of this family non-linearly, cutting back and forth between consequential moments in Noor, Salim, and Sharif’s lives and drawing connections between them. Those connections often deal directly with what sons inherit from their fathers. In 1948, Sharif chooses to stay at the family’s orange grove in Jaffa after sending his family away when it becomes clear the Arab forces were not going to win the war. He is picked up by Israeli soldiers and forced into hard labor, eventually making his way back to his family.
The moment young Salim (Salah El Din) sees his father for the first time after leaving Jaffa is one rife with meaning, although Dabis chooses to deliver almost none of it verbally. Before this moment, Salim has seen his father as a stalwart force in his life, strong and handsome, with a love for poetry and learning. The man in front of him — unshaven, gaunt, beaten down — is unrecognizable. This is what resisting looks like. For Salim, the answer is clear — keep your head down, and don’t draw attention to yourself.
This moment of a son drawing lessons he will take into adulthood from his father is paralleled in a particularly haunting manner between Salim and a young Noor (Sanad Alkabareti). On the way home from the pharmacist, they are stopped by Israeli soldiers. What follows is a disgusting display of dominance, the situation escalating until Salim is on his knees, pleading for his life. When Salim asks the soldier to do him the small dignity of at least letting his son go home before he shoots his father, the soldier backs off with a laugh. It was all a dirty, degrading joke, and it has wrecked Salim and Noor’s relationship forever. Much like Salim saw his father stand up and pay for it, Noor saw his father roll over. And that can’t be undone.
To understand why Noor joined that protest without hesitation, it’s imperative to understand how both his father and grandfather have reacted to such choices in the past. But, when we finally return to this moment — the final trauma in a long, lengthy list of injustices — “All That’s Left of You” transforms into something far more complex about the nature of grief, loss, and humanity. In the wake of Noor’s injury, decisions must be made — decisions that force Salim and Hanan to think past their righteous anger. In one scene as they wrestle with those decisions, an Imam tells them: “Your humanity is also resistance.”
The second half of “All That’s Left of You” wrestles with that premise. Dabis’ script is understated against a backdrop of sweeping landscapes that find equal beauty in a sunset over Jaffa as they do a wedding in the streets of the West Bank. Through her nuanced words, she posits impossibly thorny questions about who we owe our humanity to and why.
“All That’s Left of You” opens in Atlanta on Jan. 16.