Occupation Is a Family Affair

It is the eternal tension of political cinema: to dramatize, or inform? Cherien Dabis’ multigenerational chronicle “All That’s Left of You” begins by leaning into the latter, but sheds its didacticism to become a harrowing multigenerational tale of a Palestinian family’s nakbas. 

The story’s flashpoint is a West Bank protest in 1988 where a teenager named Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) is shot in the head by an Israel Defense Forces soldier while trying to escape by car. After lingering on the fateful windshield bullet hole, Dabis cuts to Noor’s mother Hanan (played by Dabis herself) speaking down the lens to a character off-screen. Practically addressing the audience, she recounts Noor’s family history, beginning with his grandfather. This expository dialogue is the writer-director’s way of telling us to be patient; the story of modern Palestine can only be told inside the context of decades of colonial incursion.

The first act of the film, Jordan’s Oscar entry this year for best international feature, follows the tortured dilemma of Noor’s grandfather Sharif (Adam Bakri) in 1948. A kindly young father looking out for his family, he’s forced to choose between abandoning his orange grove in Jaffa and trying to compromise with armed Israeli settlers as they arrive. Although rich in detail, the fairy tale-like dialogue feels more concerned with explaining textbook history than illuminating the lived experience of three-dimensional characters. The impulse is understandable. Educating the world afresh about the realities of occupation can require occasional hand-holding, a trade-off Dabis chooses with purpose. 

The film undergoes a vital aesthetic and narrative transformation shortly thereafter, with careful, stilted compositions giving way to a roving camera that excavates intimate drama. The timeline skips forward to 1978, and opens up a web of family connections both on screen and behind the scenes. Once landowners in Jaffa, the central characters now live in a bustling West Bank refugee camp. The older Sharif, whose memories have begun to fade, is played by Adam Bakri’s father, Mohammad Bakri, a renowned Palestinian artist who died in December 2025. Here he delivers one final, moving performance as a man desperate to return to a lost history. Sharif’s son Salim is played by Mohammad Bakri’s other son, Saleh Bakri (while the director plays Salim’s wife). Together they face the indignities of apartheid, including the guilt and debasement that Salim undergoes at the hands of Israeli border guards just to keep his family safe. It’s in witnessing and internalizing these realities that a young Noor grows up to be a rebellious teenager eager to topple his occupiers by any means necessary, though a single gunshot (which puts him in a coma) is enough to dash those dreams of freedom.

The story next travels to 1988, as Salim and Hanan are forced to prostrate themselves before the labyrinthine red tape of occupation in search of a better hospital for the gravely injured Noor. It is in this concluding section, with the film’s political backstory established, that “All That’s Left of You” pivots toward its most difficult subplot. As Noor’s condition worsens, his parents are pushed to consider the possibility of organ donation should he die. Hanan is willing to entertain the idea if it means saving lives. However, Salim — who we’ve seen held at gunpoint by sadistic IDF soldiers, and whose father was similarly held up decades prior — can’t bring himself to be pragmatic. What if Noor’s organs end up in the bodies of future IDF soldiers?

This moral dilemma is a focused metaphor for all the things that the Israeli state has extracted from this one family over the course of 40 years: It demands not only their land, and their dignity, but the very organs keeping them alive. Playing the older Salim, Saleh Bakri proves — as he did in the recent West Bank drama “The Teacher” — why he remains one of international cinema’s most captivating actors. With a thoughtfulness that gives way to shame, only to scab over into fury that rips him apart at the seams, his conception of Salim becomes the movie’s emotional anchor, guiding the audience not toward factual or logistical conclusions, but to the thorny emotional contradictions of trying to remain a good person while trapped under the violent bootheels of authority.

“Your humanity is also resistance,” Hanan tells Salim in a later scene that feels as though Dabis is speaking directly to the audience once more. It’s a plea to hold on to love and humanity as the north stars of struggle, and as reminders of the people, lands and cultures still at stake.