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SUNDANCE 2025 Premieres

Cherien Dabis • Director of All That's Left of You

“One of my deepest desires with this film from the beginning has always been to create something that has the power to heal”

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- The Palestinian-Jordanian-US director talks about production design, family histories and generating narratives of healing amidst landscapes of trauma

Cherien Dabis • Director of All That's Left of You
(courtesy of Sundance Institute, © Amin Nazemzadeh)

Generating significant anticipation over the last year, including at Marrakech International Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops in December, was Cherien DabisAll That’s Left of You [+see also:
film review
interview: Cherien Dabis
film profile
]
, her third feature as a writer-director and the second of hers in which she also stars. The US writer-director of Palestinian and Jordanian descent returns to Sundance for the third time after her 2009 debut feature, Amreeka, and her sophomore effort, May in the Summer [+see also:
trailer
interview: Cherien Dabis
film profile
]
, which opened the US gathering in 2013. Cineuropa sat down with Dabis to talk about her expansive, multigenerational historical epic as it world-premiered at Sundance.

Cineuropa: Obviously, history is often crucial to Palestinian stories, but your film’s distinctly intergenerational narrative feels unique. Why was this important to you?
Cherien Dabis:
The idea was sparked by the passing of intergenerational trauma. I also wanted to try to understand how one goes about healing it. I knew from the beginning that it was going to be a grandfather, father and son story. At some point, I also knew the woman was going to be the storyteller because so often in cultures, women are the storytellers and the healers. […] When I wrote the character of the matriarch of the family, Hanan, the character that I play, I felt she was really a part of me. It was like she was an ancestor, like a guardian angel or something.

That’s an interesting concept. Were you also drawing from any particular people in your life to create the role of Hanan?
It originated as a form of me who was really influenced by my Palestinian family, by my aunties, while growing up and going to visit Palestine. My father comes from very humble origins. He comes from a family of farmers, and so their connection to the land was really deep. There is this part of me that feels a deep connection to the land and the earth. She has all these plants. There's all this green in her home. She's like the grounding presence of the family, the one that brings everyone together. At the same time as being grounded, she has this spiritual quality about her as well. I felt excited to get to explore those qualities of myself.

How did you work with your production team to develop the style for each of the three distinct eras?
I worked with a wonderful Palestinian production designer and a wonderful cinematographer for 17 months. We wanted the film to have an overall cohesive look so that each time period wouldn’t feel episodic in any way. It was through the colour palette and the camera movement that we were able to give each time period its own specific look. 1948 is a bit more refined, elegant and polished. The colours are a bit darker, more urban, more sophisticated. Then, when you start getting into the 1970s, you get into much more poppy, superficial, bright colours. There's more camera movement. In 1948, we wanted to convey that this family was upper-middle-class. They had really nice things, they had a beautiful home, and they had curated art and furniture that take years and years to bring together when you have a home. Then they lost it all, only to end up in a refugee camp where there's a lot more grit and texture.

How do you see your feature in relation to the growing number of Palestinian films, both fiction and documentary, that are capturing public attention?
That's a very interesting question right now. One of my deepest desires with this film from the very beginning has always been to create something that has the power to heal and has the power to mirror how intergenerational trauma is passed down – and even how we might be able to transcend it. There are a lot of amazing Palestinian films out there, and I'm so proud to be part of that canon. I think this film is unique in that, in some ways, it tells the Palestinian origin story. One of my intentions when I made it was to honour my ancestors and my people, and to help people understand what Palestinians have endured for so long, but also to make something that's not just political in its approach. It's deeply personal. It's profoundly intimate.

One of the other things I think is remarkable about the movie, which I've not seen in Palestinian films, or really any film that I can remember, is that it’s an intergenerational portrait on screen and off screen. The actors who play the leads are all family. You have a father and his two sons in the film, and then the teenager who plays Noor is also their cousin. So, it's actually four generations of one family. I just found it so special to be able to work with this amazing family of actors from Palestine to make this intergenerational portrait. And their family is from Jaffa, which is where the family is from in the film.

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