The Oscar longlist for Best International Feature Film isn’t where you’d expect to find much Arab cinema, let alone anything remotely in support of Palestine. Yet with the recent establishment of distributor Watermelon Pictures, the strength and urgency of Palestinian cinema has rightfully become a force to be reckoned with even in Hollywood, and this year Palestine-focused features produced by three countries made the cut: Palestine 36 (submitted by Palestine) The Voice of Hind Rajab (submitted by Tunisia) and Cherien Dabis’ third feature film All That’s Left Of You (submitted by Jordan).
Tracing the lineage of one Palestinian family from Jaffa, All That’s Left Of You demystifies the impact of the 1948 Nakba with heartbreaking ease. The film’s first act chronicles the tribulations of father Sharif (Adam Bakri) and mother Munira (Maria Zreik) as the postwar British mandate releases the final restraint holding back the Zionist occupation, stripping them not just of their comfortably family life but of their symbolic pride and joy: the Jaffa orange grove.
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30 years later, the occupation has taken root with curfews and settler violence whilst Sharif and Munira’s son Salim (Saleh Bakri) – painfully aware of his status as an outsider in his own country – struggles to reconcile with the undeniable patriotism founded by his now-elderly father (Mohammad Bakri) and his own son Noor (played at different ages by Sanad Alkabareti and Mohammad Abed Elrahman). By 1988, a now teenage Noor finds himself dangerously passionate during the First Intifada, leading to a split-second shooting and a death so bureaucratic that his sluggish crawl to the end at the hands of Israeli apathy feels nothing short of dehumanising.
It is Noor’s legacy that convincingly underpins the film, consolidated by Salim’s wife Hanan (played by Dabis herself) pleading the case for her son’s story to be heard not in isolation, but alongside the history that every Palestinian is inextricably linked to. In the past, stories of the Nakba have been tailored to the Hollywood eye, but Dabis’ genius as storyteller is uniquely implicit. Zionist soldiers speaking broken Arabic, oil paintings of pomegranates emblematic of steadfastness and Hanan’s daily wear transitioning from bright thobes to tired, greyed-out sweatshirts; the allegorical power of these metaphors is hard to miss and a clear affirmation of the film’s authenticity.
Despite a two and a half hour runtime, All That’s Left Of You feels incredibly compact. There is much owed to Amine Bouhafa (who also scored The Voice of Hind Rajab) and his kaleidoscopic score that prevents us from losing ourselves to a simple sadness. Instead, he builds on the complexities of characters, leaving space for the elderly Sharif’s beats of unexpected humour, evoking the fast-paced, boisterous joy of the young Noor, or unifying Hanan and Munira’s maternal anxieties despite them being a generation apart.
Ultimately All That’s Left Of You didn’t make the final Oscar shortlist; The Voice of Hind Rajab did. In a crowded field for Best International Feature Film, there remains the plausible notion that each of the long-listed Palestinian stories have been forced to compete for the top spot of ‘most traumatic’, but even without the prestige of an Oscar nomination, the intelligent subtleties of Dabis’ film should not be overlooked.