Sundance 2025: All That’s Left of You is profound, deeply emotional Palestinian version of a multigenerational family saga

One of the Sundance Film Festival’s greatest impacts has been as a prominent venue in the Western world to shine the light of humanity on documentaries and narrative features from places where erasure, suppression and oppression are pernicious. 

Palestinians have recently suffered the worst imaginable human injustices, who have been pushed to the brink of total erasure. Regarding the matter of being stateless, researchers have periodically interviewed Palestinians who left their homeland and have resettled either in Europe or the U.S. 

As one example,  a 63-year-old man, who was born in the Palestinian village of Umm Khalid, an ancient coastline community where sycamore trees grew, told a researcher that statelessness is like being a “zero,” where the individual “[does] not have an identity, a personality, an existence.” After he was forced out, the man moved to Sweden, and explained the strange duality of his status. He said, “An orphan is better than a stateless person because you do not exist if you do not have a state. An orphan might have relatives that can take care of them but nobody embraces us. If you are stateless, it is like when nobody asks you if you are sick, hungry or thirsty. But when you have a state, you belong to a state that can care about you.”

In one Sundance narrative feature this year, these words about what many Palestinians feel about statelessness are embedded in the experiences of a fictional family forced out of their home in Jaffa and sent to the West Bank. The festival premiere of All That’s Left of You (اللي باقي منك), a profound, deeply emotional Palestinian version of a multigenerational family saga, has been auspicious. This is filmmaker Cherien Dabis’s third feature at Sundance. The story covers more than 75 years — 1948 to the present — and is propelled by fictional characters who are situated in the historical facts of the period. Dabis also plays a central character in the film. 

The fact that the film actually had its premiere is more than a small triumph. Because of the war, Dabis and her production team had to scrap their original plans of locations not just once but three more times. It already was a project where it was demanding to raise funds for a Palestinian film story that focuses on intimate details about three generations of a single family. Some viewers and even critics inevitably decide to contextualize the narrative and its characters on incomplete and often misinformed political arguments that rarely have been framed as fair and conscientious. But, that fundraising challenge also was aggravated, when the horrifying events unfolded in Gaza during the fall of 2023. Dabis could no longer fulfill the dream of filming in her family’s homeland and eventually locations in Jordan, Cyprus and Greece were used. Filming was completed barely three months ahead of its Sundance premiere and even now, Dabis explained, in an audience Q&A after a screening in Salt Lake City, that fundraising efforts for the film continue. 

In an interview with The Utah Review, Christopher Aoun, cinematographer, explained that once the production crew had to leave their original location, they had to find substitutes for the original architecture to build for the sets, starting with the villa for the 1948 portion of the film. This was found in Jordan but then Aoun said, “we were very lucky” to find the same style of house in Jaffa-Tel Aviv to reproduce for  the film’s final scenes. 

Saleh Bakri and Cherien Dabis appear in All That’s Left of You (اللي باقي منك) by Cherien Dabis, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

As the available budget ate up the funds with the shifting locations, Aoun focused on ensuring continuity in the visual narrative of the film would not be sacrificed. There were four different crews with different equipment and lighting, and each time, he had to bring on a new gaffer. “All of us learned a lot about communicating with each other,” he added.

Dabis plays Hanan, the mother of Noor (Mohammad Abed Elrahman), who is critically wounded during the 1988 intifada. It becomes the incident that invokes the premise of its title, when she must make a decision that any parent would find the most difficult imaginable of having to consider for a child. The scene first appears in the film’s opening, when Noor and a friend are hanging out in the street and he suddenly decides to join a protest. When gunfire happens, Noor ducks into a car but he is hit in the head by a bullet that shattered the windshield. 

Then, Hanan appears in what seems initially to be a role as narrator, staring into the camera, telling us that to understand what happened to Noor, we must begin by understanding his grandfather’s story. Much later in the film, that opening moment with Hanan becomes eminently clear. Regarding the opening sequence in the film, Aoun recalled that Dabis originally thought about not knowing where the bullet hit but to show it as flying in open air. “We talked through the scene and agreed that it would be a more poetic image in a scene of war to show the bullet shattering the windshield glass,” he explained.

Many scenes emerge from the real experiences of Dabis and her family. One particularly distressing moment comes from the 1978 section of the film, when Salim is humiliated by Israeli soldiers brandishing their guns. Noor (Sanad Alkabarete), his son who was still a young boy, cannot understand why his father would capitulate to their horribly dehumanizing demands. It would change their relationship forever. 

The acting in each time tableau is exceptional. After the opening scene of 1988, the viewer is taken back to 1948, with the grandfather Sharif (Adam Bakri) teaching his son, Salim (Salah Aldeen Mai) to love poetry and literature. The family has a prosperous life in Jaffa, with its thriving orange groves. The harmony of their life is about to be ruined, however, as the outcome of the 1948 war becomes inevitable, as the British Mandate for Palestine collapses, and leads to the catastrophe Palestinians would come to know as the Nakba. Sharif sends his wife and children elsewhere for safety and tries to reassure them that they should be able to return within a few weeks. Almost immediately, Israeli soldiers expel him from the stately home and Sharif is reduced to the status of a peon and the family now lives in a West Bank refugee camp.

Throughout the film, the cinematography adapts to the shifting  perceptions of space through all three periods in the story. “In the Forties, the shots were wider and more spacious,” Aoun said. “In the Seventies, the cramped houses in narrow streets felt claustrophobic. The sense of space continues to change through time.” 

A striking observation in Dabis’ approach to the format of a multi-generational family saga is the deviation from what we typically see in this narrative structure.  Typically, there might be many more characters in the span of three-quarters of a century but whenever there are characters outside of the family, their appearance is short, severe and negatively consequential. It is a smart choice in this instance. That sense of being reduced to essentially “zero” is most palpable in the character of Sharif, now a grandfather (played by Mohammad Bakri, incidentally the father of the actor who played the younger Sharif). It is nearly the same with Salim (played by yet another member of the distinguished acting family, Saleh Bakri, brother of Adam). 

Cherien Dabis, director of All That’s Left of You (اللي باقي منك), an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Amin Nazemzadeh.

To say much more about the narrative in All That’s Left of You would be a disservice to viewers. The events portrayed in the last sections of the film from 1988 to the present day tie everything together from the film’s first half. If we are to truly  comprehend  the family’s story, viewers should experience what those tensions and uncertainties must feel like, in order to ever feel that one day it might be possible to close the gaps and resolve the predicaments that Palestinians have endured. Aoun explained that while the film covered stories in three different eras, it was imperative to frame it as a single continuous flow. When Hanan reappears later in the film, taking on a narrator role for the second time in the film, the scene completes the narrative task of that single continuous flow.

Aoun said the “psychology of the camera” dictated many angles, movement and framing to tie everything from all three eras into a continuous thread.  The 1948 villa scene feels like old Hollywood, as if it was filmed with a heavy-duty dolly track. “It conveys a poetic, happy moment with a touch of nostalgia,” he added. “For the Seventies, it feels more fragile and the images are more devoid of color and much less sophisticated than in the Forties.” For the 1988 street protest scene, Aoun said, “We wanted a scene that felt like it could have been in a mainstream American film about high school students, with lots of energetic movement.” He added, “but the camera stops and doesn’t move. It then shifts into something even more claustrophobic than before.”  The parallels between narrative and camera language are just as clear through the film’s remaining scenes, reflecting a cold, sobering reality. 

Originally, they had planned to film the scenes of the main refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jericho, which has a hot desert climate, but after leaving, they had to use a location in Jordan. This necessitated a change in color textures from desert yellow to greener, more full natural hues.  Aoun said that some of the most unforgettable moments in the production process emotionally affected the crew. “One scene in 1948 shows the exodus in Gaza and then suddenly we were watching the latest exodus in Gaza on the news and social media,” he recalled.

Negative space in the framing of shots was just as significant. In the 1948 section, the presence of the characters fills in the frames but after the 1978 scene ,when Salim is humiliated by the Israeli soldiers, negative space takes on heightened impact, indicating  a tragic, pensive dynamic that reminds us of how much is missing in the family’s life. After the grandfather’s death, the color void expands further, in scenes such as when they are searching desperately for the son’s ID.

In the same research article that included the comments of the man from Umm Khalid, Miriyam, 42, who was forced out of Nazareth and moved to France,  said, “Not having your own homeland, your own state, is to be subjected to others’ mercy, to be subjected to others’ ferocity … You can’t create the future that you want, so you don’t live life to its fullest…” Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, the researcher, summarized the point: “Miriyam also argued that stateless people are unable to make decisions about their own future, and are ‘subjected to others’ mercy’ or ‘ferocity,’ simultaneously because of the absence of the Palestinian state and the absence of the Palestinian homeland.” Throughout the film, the family acutely knows the pain of what it is to be subjected simultaneously to the ferocity and mercy of others. 

 All That’s Left of You (اللي باقي منك) gives us a gateway to a comprehensive level of understanding  that is rarely evident in the public conversations about Palestinians and the devastation of their ancestral homes. 

Among the executive producers for the film is Geralyn Dreyfous, co-founder of the Utah Film Center and of Impact Partners Film. For festival tickets and more information, see the Sundance website.

Leave a Reply