Palestinian-American multi-hyphenate Cherien Dabis will soon be back in Sundance for the third time – after “May in the Summer” and “Amreeka” – with “All That’s Left of You,” a sweeping epic featuring three generations of Palestinians that provides an origin story of their plight at a very timely moment.
The drama, which takes its cue from a Palestinian teen confronting Israeli soldiers at a West Bank protest – after which his mother recounts the events that led him to that fateful moment – was in pre-production in Palestine when the Israel-Hamas war broke out, forcing Dabis and the crew to relocate.
Below, Dabis speaks to Variety about her personal connection to this ambitious labor of love and what drives her hope for the Palestinian people despite the fact that “the politicians have failed us.”
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You clearly have a personal connection to the film. Talk to me about your desire to bring this intergenerational epic to the screen.
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Well, it’s something I had been thinking about for many years. I just felt that our origin story was missing in a way. Really, the very beginnings of Palestinian suffering, how Palestinians became refugees, that was completely missing from the landscape. And in many ways, I lived aspects of the story through my dad, who’s a Palestinian refugee. He lived most of his life in forced exile and had to get foreign citizenship in order to return to just visit his family in the West Bank, the only home he’d ever known. There are aspects of the story that I lived and then there are aspects of the story that lived with me. And I would say those are really the two reasons that ultimately inspired the film.
Tell me more about the personal aspect.
My first memory of traveling to Palestine was when I was 8 years old and we were held at the Allenby Bridge border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank for around 12 hours. We were interrogated, the contents of our suitcase was kind of picked through and things were confiscated. The soldiers ordered us all to be strip-searched, including my baby sisters, aged 3 and 1. My dad, utterly humiliated, confronted them and they began to scream at him. I was convinced they were going to kill him. This is one of my earliest memories of really understanding what it meant to be Palestinian, let’s just say.
I heard you were prepping to shoot when the Oct. 7 attacks took place, and had to relocate to Cyprus and Greece. How did you manage that?
Yeah, it was pretty incredible. We had planned to shoot in Palestine and Cyprus, but we were only going to shoot about 10% of the movie in Cyprus. We had prepped the entire film in Palestine. We’d begun construction on our refugee camp location, which we were going to shoot in Jericho. We had a lot of momentum, and suddenly, we had to come to a screeching halt. There’s so much story to tell there. I think the gist of it is that, within a few days, we realized that we were going to have to evacuate. My foreign crew, obviously, didn’t want to stay. Their families were pressuring them to leave, and I felt responsible for everyone that I had brought there. So I had to find a way to get them out. That was the beginning of a massive, not just logistical, but financial crisis for the film. I realized at that point that I was not only helming a movie, but I was running a sinking corporation or a corporation in total crisis. The logistical nightmare included things like embassies closing and having to get our Palestinian crew out of the West Bank. It was challenging. It was really like we were making a movie about what was happening as it was happening, and in some way, living a surreal parallel experience, within the world of art, of course.
In terms of the film’s relevance, the narrative sets up a symbolic situation that offers a glimmer of hope. With the Israel-Hamas ceasefire now underway, what are your hopes and thoughts about the prospects for the Palestinian people?
I wrote this film years ago, and I always hope for hope. I think that the Palestinian people really do as well. There’s a line in the movie where my character actually says: “We never lose hope.” It’s particularly poignant now that there is a ceasefire, and hopefully, it’s just the beginning of something. First and foremost, I hope that it can be the beginning of a period of grieving and healing. And that is something that I think the film helps to inspire. My intention in making it was always: “Let’s recognize the pain, let’s recognize what happened.” Because there can be no hope for a way forward without the recognition of what people suffered, of the injustice that people suffered. If we can recognize that, then maybe there’s something we can do to right the wrong and to make people feel seen and to create something that we can base something real upon.
I hope that it can create a sense of recognition, I hope that it can create a conversation, that it can create a cathartic healing, certainly for my own people. I hope that it comes at the right time for what is happening in the world, so that, again, these parallel tracks that the movie and that art and life seem to be on, in this particular moment for this particular project, that maybe there’s something that can be done. Maybe there is something this movie can inspire.
I recently interviewed the Palestinian and Israeli directors of doc “No Other Land” and they were very skeptical that with Netanyahu in power anything good for the Palestinians could ever happen. What are your thoughts?
I’m not at all surprised by the response. I think that the hope that the movie offers is not political hope. I think the politicians have failed us, that’s very clear. I don’t have faith in political systems. I’m talking more about hope in humanity; hope that people can see the injustice. Hope that people can hold onto their humanity, lead with their humanity. I think that’s what the film inspires. We all individually have to do the work. I don’t think that we can pin our hopes on politicians, I really don’t. We’re living in a harrowing time with what we’re seeing in so many places, and it’s hard for me to sit here, as a Palestinian, and try to sell you hope when we’ve just gone through one of the darkest, most harrowing periods in our entire history. So I’m not going to do that. But what I am going to say is that I have hope in people. I have hope in humanity. Over the last however many months it’s been, we have seen people wake up and really start to understand what’s happening, and that’s what gives any of us hope, I think. That’s what gives Palestinians hope at this moment.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
