“A piece of paper doesn't matter,” shouts a Zionist soldier at Palestinian patriarch, Sharif (Adam Bakri), in All That’s Left of You. It is 1948, and the city of Jaffa has just surrendered to Israel in the hopes that the violence and destruction at their hands will cease. One morning, Sharif ventures into his orange grove and meets the guns of several soldiers. Doubting Sharif’s claims to the grove, they ask how he can even prove to be the owner of this land. Sharif replies that he has the deed just inside the house. “A piece of paper doesn't matter.” An argument ensues, and Sharif is rendered unconscious by the blow of a gun, then dragged out of his own orange grove, the very greenery he helped his father cultivate.

Award-winning filmmaker Cherien Dabis’ sweeping tale of three generations, set against the occupation in the West Bank, closely follows Sharif, his son Salim (Saleh Bakir), and his grandson Noor (Muhammed Abed Elrahman), in an intimate portrayal of three men with alternating dispositions for enduring political strife. As tensions rise over the span of 74 long years, each man seeks to foster hope and revolt in varying ways, but the family splinters in their disagreements over how to survive. All That’s Left of You is a tremendous testament to spiritual and political inheritance, as it questions how we honor and invoke our ancestors, but also how we challenge them for the sake of posterity. 

Considering this is a story about stolen land, about locating pride amidst a diaspora, Dabis, who also plays Salim’s wife Hanan, is acutely interested in the symbiotic relationship between landscapes and architecture. At the film’s beginning in the late 40s, the camera lingers on the Sharif’s family home, particularly its spacious dining room, where the family communes over food during the day and huddles in fear during nightly bombings. As the family is pushed out into a West Bank refugee camp, space becomes more tightly confined, and an older Sharif (Mohammed Bakri) gets lost and confused within the narrow corridors surrounding their small home. The dialogue too frequently invokes the terrain, as Sharif reminisces on his home in Jaffa, the fig trees he would sleep under, and the crisp smell of his oranges, “The closer you get to the land, the closer you are to God,” he tells Hanan, a young Noor sitting beside him. 

Hanan plays an instrumental role in the film, providing an oral history of her family and the moments of pain and healing they experience together. Bakri and Dabis deliver simmering performances as a husband and wife struggling to balance the optimism their generation carries with the grief forced upon them. Hanan’s temperament lies somewhere between these men, hopeful like her husband but more attuned to her father-in-law's pain. The film follows Salim as he grows from a curious, intellectual boy into a teacher who fights resentment and bitterness for as long as he can, before it catches up to him. The palpable web of deep family affinity is strengthened by the real-life family ties, as Mohammed Bakri, who plays an older Sharif, is the father of Adam and Saleh Bakri, who play younger Sharif and son Salim, respectively. 

Together, Salim and Hanan observe their son embody more of their grandfather’s character than their own. As of 2024, children comprised nearly half of the total population in Palestine. A child is the image of absolute innocence, the beacon of the future. All That’s Left of You treasures the child, the precious way in which they learn and study the world around them, while also exemplifying that it is not only children who should be worthy of global sympathy or remorse. These children, if given the chance, grow to become deeply committed parents to their own children, a spirit of community being just as vital as a sense of belonging and home. In turn, the film bluntly centralizes how this familial devotion becomes something to exploit by the Zionist agenda, whether that be by forcing a family into fractured exile as some members choose to move out of the country entirely, or through soldiers hellbent on humiliating and taunting Palestinians who decide to stay.

Many Americans, whose families have been in the country for generations, may speak of this allegedly profound feeling of protecting their homeland at all costs, yet the heartbreaking imagery in All That’s Left of You will seem completely foreign to them. Many native Americans will never truly know what it feels like to be bombed out of the very city your ancestors grew up in, only to watch your oppressors move in to the four walls you once called home. The horrors on display in the film are painfully commonplace, endured alongside moments of joy as grand as a wedding or as small as being tickled before bed. It is nothing short of abysmal that while the White House insists on using AI imagery to propagate warped nationalism, the family in All That’s Left of You honors their homeland by reciting the poetry of a near-lost language, spray-painting messages of love as a form of rebellion, and pondering the very nature that makes the heart beat.