In October 2023, Cherien Dabis was in Palestine preparing to shoot her third feature film, All That’s Left Of You, when embassies began closing, and she was faced with the task of evacuating her own crew members from an escalating genocide. A production years in the making suddenly faced the possibility of collapse.

Sitting across from her in London ahead of the UK release, I’m struck that the film, which traces one family from the 1948 Nakba to 2022, experienced its very own displacement. 

All That’s Left Of You tells an intergenerational story of how a Palestinian teen gets swept up into a West Bank protest that changes the course of his family’s life. In a year where Palestinian films are receiving unprecedented international recognition and critical acclaim, Dabis and I journey together through her historical epic. 

Isabella Kajiwara (Skin Deep): This film has lived with you for years. What was it like making it in October 2023, while its creation was being interrupted by the reality it holds?

Cherien Dabis: I still can’t quite believe the timing. We prepped the movie for five months under occupation. When we evacuated Palestine, we went to Cyprus, where we had always planned to shoot 10%. We were planning to shoot 90% in Palestine. We thought: we’ll get that done, and then hopefully by that time, we’ll be able to go back to Palestine. And of course, we had no idea that the situation would just escalate and escalate and that no, we weren’t going to be able to go back. 

So we went to Jordan and we started prep all over again. But at least we got to shoot in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, and work with the refugee community on what is essentially the telling of their own story. 

So much of this film felt like divine intervention. There were moments where I was like: okay, we don’t have the money, we have to shut down. And some miracle would come through at the last minute. It happened so many times that we thought, okay, are the ancestors looking out for me? Is that what’s happening here? [She laughs]

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The movie definitely demanded a lot from me. It’s in some ways inspired by my desire to explore my own intergenerational trauma. But I also had to step into a massive leadership role, navigating evacuating a crew in occupied territory that had just exploded into war nearby. 

This film is almost, I would say, a manifestation of my life’s purpose. Playing so many different roles during the making meant mining an emotional depth, which was also really profound. In some ways, the actors and I talked a lot about how we didn’t feel like we were acting, but instead channeling our grief.

SD: You’re a writer, director and actor in this film. What did that proximity allow you to discover, about the story and yourself? 

CD: I discovered that Hanan [the character that Dabis plays] and I are really searching for the same thing: that I, as the storyteller-filmmaker, am looking to find meaning in the trauma and the suffering, and therefore looking to heal in some way. 

I learned a lot from her. I got to explore the depths of my compassion and the depths of my anger. She taught me that you feel pain, you go through it, and that’s how you get to the other side of it. 

“It didn’t feel like we were acting – we were channeling our grief”

Hanan was always there to show me the way, even in the hardest of circumstances. We found ourselves making a movie about what was happening as it was happening. Art and life merged and there were days where we were shooting scenes that looked exactly like what was coming out of Gaza. And so we couldn’t get away from what was happening, because we were either watching it on our phones or recreating it for the film. 

SD: This film refuses to center the spectacle. Violence doesn’t go unchecked, but it’s the emotional experiences and consequences which take centre stage. Why was that important?

CD: Because I wanted to show how history impacts people. It’s the part of Palestine that people don’t get to see: the emotional experience of what it is to endure decades of this ongoing violence. And it’s all kinds of violence as well: physical, psychological, administrative. It takes on many different forms, and it has devastating consequences. 

The Nakba is a collective trauma for all Palestinians, no matter where you are, so I wanted to explore that as well. It’s a movie about the ongoing impact of the Nakba, because the Nakba never ended, it has just bled into everything that’s happening today. It’s all just accelerated.

SD: There’s a powerful scene where Hanan and Salim seek guidance from an imam about an organ donation. How did that scene come into being?

CD: I mean we never really see Islam (represented) in that way, right? We rarely get to be inside of a mosque, hearing from an imam who’s giving different interpretations of Hadith in the Quran. This is not something that people get to see outside of the Arab world. 

I, as the writer, didn’t know what Islam’s stance was on organ donation. I needed a way to externalize the conflict that the characters were having, the internal conflict. I didn’t know enough about it, so I ended up talking to two different Imams and hearing their different interpretations. I found it so fascinating and beautiful, and I thought I need to write a scene that includes some of this dialogue.  

“We ended up making a film about what was happening, as it was happening”

SD: Towards the end of the film, there’s that conversation where an Israeli organ recipient requests empathy from your Palestinian character. But there’s also the danger of false equivalence. How did you approach writing that exchange? 

CD: I’ve had so many conversations like that as a Palestinian who grew up in the diaspora. I’m used to an Israeli trying to create some sense of false equivalence, or an American even, or just people who doesn’t know the situation with enough depth. So in some ways, it was quite intuitive for me to write and to navigate. It’s a tightrope.

Part of what I wanted to achieve in that scene was to show how much humanity and generosity this family has shown this man. And despite that, he’s still a bit of a brick wall. He cannot see it or take it in, because it threatens who he is. That’s a huge part of the problem. 

And here you have many societies who refuse to see what Palestinians have endured, despite the fact that it wasn’t their fault. They’re not responsible for the persecution of the Jewish people. That was Europe, you know, and the Palestinians are paying an incredibly heavy price for that. 

I wanted to be honest, as a part of exploring my own trauma. I wanted to say the things that I felt I couldn’t say as a kid growing up in a small town in Ohio, fearing I would offend someone, or be attacked. 

SD: What other forms of honesty felt necessary while making this film?

CD: I wanted the movie to hold up a mirror for many of us who have this collective and intergenerational trauma. I wanted to show different reactions to occupation. Through doing this, the movie does trigger people or get people to question how they deal with their trauma. And that is one of the things that I was hoping to do. 

A lot of the characters in the film deal with their trauma through silence, and we see what the impact of that is and how that’s not helpful. Ultimately, one of the things I wanted to be really honest about, that I think can be confronting for people, is this question of, are we allowing ourselves to be dehumanised, or are we holding on to our humanity?

SD: Class feels like an undercurrent in the film – particularly in how the family experiences 1948 and the shifts in their material conditions over time through dispossession and displacement. How were you thinking about class as part of the story?

CD: The world tends to look at Palestinians as a monolith, and we forget that it’s a whole society, just like any other society, with different classes and different religions and many different layers. There are people surprised to see an upper middle class Palestinian family, and yet those families did lose everything as well.

I also wanted to show a part of Palestinian society that we’ve almost never seen, and that’s urban Palestine in the 1940s. If we’ve ever seen Palestine in the 1940s it’s been village life. And I grew up with the myth that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land.

So I wanted to show that not only were we there as villagers and Bedouin and farmers – we also had an urban society. Yaffa was the center of it – it was a port city that exported oranges all over the world. We had cinemas and newspapers, and again, it’s something that surprises people. 

People lost everything. Whether you had a lot or a little, it doesn’t matter, you still lost all of it.

SD: You’ve spoken about how through the research process you’ve been inspired by Palestinian literature and other elements of culture. What specific references did you feel were nourishing to you in that time? Has literature always been a touch point with your filmmaking process?

CD: As far as literature, Ghassan Kanafani’s Return to Haifa was definitely one of the stories that inspired me. Mornings in Jenin and On The Hills of God, the sprawling epic quality of those novels just really inspired me. 

I actually started out as a writer. I started writing bad poetry when I was 12. I mean, isn’t that all how we all start writing? It is a universal experience! Mine was very bad, but that was my way of expressing emotions. Then poetry became short stories, then short stories became an interest in filmmaking and screenplays, and so it just kind of evolved from there. 

The commonality is that it’s all just storytelling, which I love. For some reason, when it comes to filmmaking, literature helps me more than film.

“The world sees Palestinians as a monolith, but it’s a whole society with different classes and different religions”

SD: After spending so much time inside the story creatively and emotionally… I know you said it had asked a lot of you, and I wanted to come back to that. What was asked of you? And what has it left with you?

CD: There were so many obstacles in the making of this film. I think what the film asked of me was to find the opportunities in those obstacles. How do you flow like water around the obstacle? It really felt like a spiritual pursuit. It was a spiritual journey.

SD: And now the film is out, what do you feel like is beginning or what is on its way?

CD: I am getting glimpses of what comes after. I’m bubbling with ideas, and am taking the film out to so many different audiences. But I’m definitely looking forward to the day where I can take some time. With this film, I worked pretty non-stop for three years straight. I want a period of input and not output. 

But really, it’s been a gift – to have this movie at this time. As exhausting as it’s been, I don’t know that I could have done it or sustained it for this long if it wasn’t such a gift.

All That’s Left of You is in cinemas now.

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