All That's Left of You

Every son looks up to his father, but at a certain point, their eyes will meet at a level plane. That's the way it's supposed to be, at least, but at the start of All That's Left of You, we're left to think that might not happen for one teenage boy, living in the West Bank in 1988, and his father.

It's important to note the father-son relationships of this film, even though writer/director Cherien Dabis' tale is far more expansive than that. Indeed, the implied narrator of the story is that teen's mother Hanan, played by the filmmaker herself in a quiet but potent performance. Her character almost exists in the background of this tale, which is ostensibly about the woman's son, husband, and father-in-law—how those boys and men connect, evolve, find common ground or divide on a fundamental level, and try to remain a family over the years and through the decades.

In the prologue, however, Dabis makes certain that we know this is Hanan's story, too. She's the one telling it, to an initially unseen person behind the camera but, in the way the actress' eyes pierce through the screen as she stares straight down the lens, directly to us, as well. Something has happened to her son, who hears a protest down the street in the town where he lives and, for reasons that will become plainly and painfully clear by the time the narrative returns to this time, feels compelled to join the march.

Some Palestinian protestors begin throwing stones at armed Israeli soldiers down the road. The soldiers begin shooting—one bullet before a long pause and another one. The son, named Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) and only 16-years-old, is hurried to a car but, just at that moment, one of those gunshots goes right through the windshield.

One can suspect what happens to Noor, given the look on Hanan's face as she tries to relate the story of what happened to her son, but even then, simple assumptions cannot get at the depth of pain, confusion, and uncertainty that arise from this moment of violence. When the film returns to 1988 and the aftermath of the protest, the details that are revealed, the process that this family must endure, and the decisions that two parents have to make are unbearable to witness.

Before that, though, Hanan explains that, in order to understand Noor, one must know about the boy's paternal grandfather. He's Sharif, initially played by Adam Bakri in the narrative's chronologically first section—set in 1948, as the future of the British territory known as Mandatory Palestine is being fought over. This history is, of course, difficult and thorny to discuss, since the conflict over and about this land and places immediately beyond it continues to simmer or rage (On account of the most recent and—as of this writing—ongoing war, the film's production, for example, had to move from the places of the story's backdrop to Greece and Jordan). To be clear, Dabis' film is inherently political, because it possesses and is steadfast in its perspective, but it is not a polemic.

There is simply too much humanity in this story for that. In '48, Sharif and his family live in Jaffa, and as those fighting for the creation of a Jewish state and diminishing local Arab forces battle, this man simply wants to continue a life here, with his wife Munira (Maria Zreik) and their children. The couple's youngest is Salim (Salah El Din), a boy who idolizes his father and clings to the man's every word when he speaks of poetry and the Arabic language.

As mortar shells reach the orange grove that Sharif's family has owned for generations, he realizes his wife and children must leave, while he stays behind to negotiate terms of a surrender. After Sharif is arrested and sent to a prison camp for refusing to hand over his land, Salim eagerly waits for his father to return. Even after Sharif does, the boy grows up into a man who still seems to be awaiting the father he knew to come back to him.

That is, more or less, the heartbreaking course of this narrative. In 1978, an adult Salim (played by Saleh Bakri), now a literature teacher at a local school in a West Bank that has since been occupied by Israel, and an older Sharif (played by Mohammad Bakri, who is, yes, the real-life father of the actor playing his character's son) aren't as close they might have been under other circumstances.

Sharif lives with Salim and Hanan, but he is a shell of his former self—a widower, a man who lost his home, someone cynical about politics, an old man showing signs that his memory is going. Meanwhile, Salim just wants the best life for himself, his own family, and his father, and for that to happen, he believes he needs to stay out of politics and keep his head down.

Dabis ensures that we understand and sympathize with every perspective of the major characters here, and that's because these characters exist as fully developed, ever-changing, and relatable people—not simply figures caught up in the tides of the history through which they're living. It's devastating, for example, to watch a young Noor (Sanad Alkabareti), who sometimes looks at his father the way Salim would gaze at his own as a boy, realize that his father is not the man his beloved grandfather is. That comes when some young, cruel Israeli soldiers stop Salim and Noor, humiliate and threaten the two, and leave the father to know that he protected his son as well as he could and the son to think of his father as a coward.

The rest of the film, in which decades pass—with characters becoming firmer in those shifts or exiting for good off-screen—in a flash, brings all of this back to the protest, the violence, what Salim and Hanan can and cannot and must choose to do, and beyond. All That's Left of You is a sprawling film in the scope of its narrative, the richness of its characters, and the depth of its emotional impact. It is about pain across generations but in a way that is more about endurance and deciding what is best, not only for each other, but also to sustain one's own humanity.