In the writer-director Cherien Dabis’s generation-spanning drama “All That’s Left of You,” two friends, Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) and Malek (Rida Suleiman), tear through the streets of the Occupied West Bank. It’s 1988, early in the First Intifada. The carousing teenagers come upon a protest that turns to chaos, and it appears that one of them has been shot. We’re left hanging as the film cuts to Noor’s mother, Hanan (the Palestinian American Dabis giving an aching lead performance).
“I must tell you who is my son,” she says, meeting the camera’s gaze. “But to do that I must tell you what happened to his grandfather.” The camera sails over the Mediterranean and back in time to Jaffa and the home of that grandfather, the orange grower Sharif (Adam Bakri); his wife, Munira (Maria Zreik); and their children. It’s 1948.
“All That’s Left of You” recounts the story of three generations of Palestinian men, ending in 2022: Noor, Sharif (Adam Bakri is the younger Sharif, and Mohammad Bakri, the older Sharif), and his son Salim (a terrific Saleh Bakri).
When “All That’s Left of You” (Jordan’s entry for the Academy Award) loops back to the opening clash, it takes a turn that finds Hanan and Salim plunged into a parental, cultural, morally anguished dilemma.
In depicting scenes of dispossession and fraught encounters with soldiers, the filmmaker offers a saga of trauma that has antecedents in dramas set during previous mass conflicts like Apartheid as well as in the Jim Crow South. If that strikes you as pointed, it is.
All That’s Left of You Not rated. In Arabic and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. In theaters.
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