The current, terminal stage of the Israel-Palestine conflict – combined with the educative efforts of various commentators on it and growing sympathy with the Palestinian cause – calls for a shift in media representations. In Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You [+leggi anche:
intervista: Cherien Dabis
scheda film], history and documentary melt into the broader narrative of a universal family saga, allowing complex historical details to be enshrined as empowering personal and collective myths. Put more simply, it’s hard to imagine this story being told (and funded) in quite this manner even a decade ago; the moment just calls for it now, and Dabis’ powerful film induces an easy rapport with her characters’ grandiose suffering that makes more vivid, rather than diminishing, the trauma they’ve endured. Premiering at Sundance this weekend, it represents a striking return to features for Dabis following a hiatus spent working on high-end US series after her breakout film Amreeka. She also doubles up in a strong leading role, which brings to mind Nadine Labaki’s screen presence in her own passionate films.

Although Dabis was born and raised in the USA, she takes inspiration from her exiled Palestinian father’s experiences, devising for her self-penned screenplay an archetypal family whose dire trajectory evokes a cross-section of the Nakba’s crushing impact. With the narrative timeline expanding sequentially from 1948, 1978 and 1988 to 2022 (with a wraparound segment in the third date), the fortunes of the Hammad family – incidentally played by three members of the eminent Bakri acting dynasty – initially see them living a secure, upper-middle-class existence as prosperous farmers in Jaffa, after which they flee to a Nablus refugee camp in the West Bank, where a tragedy afflicting their offspring during an anti-occupation protest disturbs their predicament further.

How Dabis shows the dispossession of their property by Zionist forces, seen from the point of view of the family’s patriarch, Sharif (Adam Bakri in the 1948 section, with his own father Mohammad taking up the mantle in 1978), could actually be more harrowing and destabilising to witness; although Sharif does spend a few months in a prison camp, whilst his wife Munira and son Salim go westwards, the generational wealth they hold means they will always appear somewhat safe, no matter if they live elsewhere. Although this might have been restricted by budget (not to diminish the film’s fine production values and visual grandeur), the fact that we don’t see their strife in the wider context of collective dispossession slightly underplays this stage of the Nakba’s tumultuous impact.

Yet, true to the filmmaker’s own diasporic status, the movie’s emotional crux alights on the generational and political conflicts between the family’s men, with Salim (played as an adult by Saleh Bakri) a more conformist and pliant figure by comparison to his father, still bearing metaphorical scars in his old age, with his nationalist principles beginning to influence his grandson Noor. Noor’s ultimate fate as a young adult then triggers in his father further existential acknowledgement of their physical and also mental estrangement from land that was ultimately theirs, and whose restitution would finally bestow some peace upon his family.

Viewers of this film may be bothered by its cut corners, and could feel this imagined family can’t fully crystallise and represent the Nakba’s violent ongoing impact. Yet there’s also a refreshing resistance to achieving false balance and venerating both sides’ arguments; through Dabis’ storytelling, the Palestinians are dignified, and Israel (if not individual Israelis) carries all the guilt, with much owed.

All That’s Left of You is a co-production between Germany, Cyprus, Palestine, Jordan, Greece, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, staged by Pallas Film, Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion, Displaced Pictures and Nooraluna Productions. Its world sales are overseen by The Match Factory.