Generational Sprawling Epic: All That’s Left of You

Photo Courtesy of Sarah Harvey Publicity

The critically acclaimed epic from Palestinian American director Cherien Dabis, All That’s Left of You follows the Palestinian struggle through the multigenerational lens of one family over seventy-five years in Palestine.

The story begins with Hanan (played by Cherien Dabis) pleading with a character we cannot see to listen to her son's (Noor) story. She insists that to understand her son, we must first know his grandfather, and so the flashback begins. We are transported to Jaffa 1948, where Noor’s grandfather, Sharif (Adam Bakri) is living during the first Nakba, which refers to the displacement and dispossession of approximately 700,000 – 750,000 Palestinians during the first Arab-Israeli war.

The timeframe for this film, spanning from 1948 to 2022, captures the intricate, intergenerational existence of a family that has been forcibly displaced from their country as they fight for a sense of home and recognition. This narrative approach serves as a directorial philosophy, suggesting that the present is inseparable from the past, and that meaning in the now only can be understood by first understanding what has come before.

Dabis creates a careful serenity of Sharif's home, basked in the sun, surrounded by orange groves, reciting poetry at the dinner table.  As the British withdraw their soldiers from Palestine and the bombs that start in the distance begin to move in, this tranquillity is quickly ruptured. Though his children and wife are worried, Sharif insists that the moment will pass.  As the situation worsens, Sharif eventually evacuates his family, but chooses to stay himself and guard the house. As his crying family is packed into the car, Sharif stands next to his orange groves and watches them drive away. Through moments like these, Christopher Aoun’s cinematography captures the fleeting warmth between the characters, particularly in the way that bodies are framed against the shifting light. This subtlety reveals the transient beauty of human experience, intensifying the agony of what follows. Shortly after his family leaves, Sharif is subjected to relentless cruelty and brutality as he is detained and imprisoned in a labour camp.

Photo Courtesy of Sarah Harvey Publicity

The next time jump brings the story to the early 1970s where the older Sharif is now living in a refugee camp in the West Bank. This chapter opens with a wedding and farewell, reinforcing Dabis’ cyclical vision of life under occupation, where celebration and separation exist side by side. What gives this section much of its emotional depth is the subtle ideological distance between Sharif (Mohammed Bakri) and his youngest son, Salim (Saleh Bakri). In a tender real-life echo, father and son share the screen, adding an unspoken intimacy to their dynamic. Unlike his father, Salim seeks invisibility rather than resistance. We witness as the once-spirited boy who eagerly recited poetry has grown into a subdued schoolteacher, using imagination to shield his students from the brutality of their reality while attempting to bury the memories of his childhood in Jaffa.

As the story moves toward 1978, the film reveals a stifled existence defined by curfews, seized land, and a population compressed into increasingly bleak quarters. This segment holds one of the most devastating moments of the film: during a brief break in their curfew, Salim and his son Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) are stopped by Israeli soldiers on the way back from the pharmacy. The soldiers begin by asking what they are doing out during curfew, and the situation quickly escalates. As the soldiers bark fractured Arabic, their cruelty strips him of dignity, leaving Noor to witness his father’s helpless submission. The moment is shattering, and formative: when Noor later screams at his father, calling him a coward, the line cuts with the weight of a trauma that will define the rest of his life. It is here that the film’s emotional and political core fully crystallises, carving the blueprint for Noor’s future and reinforcing Dabis’ meditation on inherited pain, memory, and the quiet devastation of survival.

While Dabis’ drama powerfully traces the emotional fracture within a family shaped by displacement, particularly the widening distance between Sharif, Salim, and later Noor, its earliest historical passages can feel blunt. His directness also communicates the inescapable reality of occupation and how injustice compounds across generations, grounding the narrative in a clear sense of moral urgency.

Photo Courtesy of Sarah Harvey Publicity

The film gains greater emotional and thematic complexity when it returns to 1988 and refocuses on Noor. What follows is a tense, time-sensitive journey obstructed by an unforgiving system of bureaucratic control, adding urgency and intimacy to the film’s human stakes. Although the final act occasionally drifts and seems uncertain in its approach to resolution, its more contemplative rhythm allows space for reflection and difficult moral choices. In doing so, the film moves beyond a purely stark worldview toward more ambiguous, humane territory, even allowing for the possibility of healing before arriving at a quiet, circular conclusion.

All That’s Left of You explores the fragility, fallibility and importance of memory and treats it not as nostalgia, but as a necessity. It becomes a prerequisite for understanding both the present moment and the inherited wounds that shape it. Structured as an extended act of remembrance, the film insists that Noor’s life in the occupied West Bank can only be comprehended by tracing the story back to his grandfather Sharif and the rupture of the Nakba. Through intimate, carefully rendered moments of a grove of orange trees, poetry at the dinner table, the devastating choice to stay behind, Dabis preserves a vanished world while charting how its destruction echoes forward in time. For Sharif, memory hardens into rage and grief; for his son Salim, it becomes something to suppress in the hope of survival. Yet the film ultimately frames remembrance itself as a form of resistance, an insistence on historical presence in the face of erasure. Even in its final turn, Noor’s death and the consequent donation of his organs, his heart going to an Israeli man, memory becomes a conduit for meaning, empathy, and the fragile possibility of healing. Forgetting may offer mercy, but the heart, both literal and metaphorical, continues to remember. Across nearly seventy-five years, the film reveals memory as a living force, shaping identity, burden, and resilience in equal measure.

All That's Left of You runs for 145 minutes and will be out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from the 6th of February 2026.