ALL THAT'S LEFT OF YOU**

Writer-director-actor Cherien Dabis's ALL THAT IS LEFT OF YOU is an ambitious multi-generational story of a Palestinian family.  

It begins with the death of a young sprightly man called Noor during the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1988, at which point his grieving mother Hanan tells us that to understand her son, we have to understand his father. And so we go back to the 1948 "Nakba" when the father Salim is a young man, watching his own father Sharif forced to grapple with whether to leave Palestine as the new Israeli state is established, or stay and protect the family farm.  We discover that the choice to stay is a tough one. They are moved off their family farm and into town.  

We then fast forward to 1978 in the West Bank, and the young Salim is now himself married and a father.  Even small things like picking up medicine from a pharmacy is complicated by arbitrary curfews and humilating police interrogations.  Salim's son Noor grows up seeing his father humiliated, frustrated, angry, so is it any surprise that he is swept up in the demonstrations of the First Intifada? 

The problem with Cherien Dabis' clearly heartfelt film is that it's so simplistic in its politics. Everyone in the family is good, and the Israelis are all bad. The military, policy, the heartless bureaucrats....  Maybe there is some hope for nuance in the final more contemporary act, but not really, because that's not what this film is interested in. So it's heartfelt, and I have a lot of sympathy with the predicament of the protagonists, but it would have felt more earned if it hadn't felt like such a heavyhanded piece of agitprop. 

ALL THAT'S LEFT OF YOU has a running time of 145 minutes.  It played Sundance 2025. It went on release in the UK last November and in the USA last week.