Release Date: U.S. limited theatrical release began Jan 9, 2026
Runtime: 145 minutes (2h 25m)
Rated: Unrated
Production Companies: Pallas Film, Displaced Pictures, Nooraluna Productions, Twenty Twenty Vision, AMP Filmworks
Producers: Cherien Dabis, Thanassis Karathanos, Martin Hampel, Karim Amer
Cinematography: Christopher Aoun
Editing: Tina Baz
Music/Composer: Amine Bouhafa
All That’s Left of You (2025)
Director & Writer: Cherien Dabis
Cast: Cherien Dabis, Saleh Bakri, Mohammed Bakri, Adam Bakri, Maria Zreik, Muhammed Abed Elrahman, Sanad Alkabareti, Salah El Din, Dominik Maringer, Hayat Abu Samra
SPOILER WARNING: This review discusses All That’s Left of You in detail, including major plot developments across all timelines and the film’s ending. If you prefer to go in unspoiled, consider reading only the opening and final paragraphs.
Cherien Dabis embodies what it means to be an artist fully committed to her material, tripling her role in All That’s Left of You as writer, director, and Hanan—the mother of a family placed under a microscope as Palestine itself is explored from the 1940s through the 1980s. Through fragmented segments of their lives, Dabis quite literally guides us as the narrator through the generational turmoil this family endures. The film is crafted with an intimacy that feels almost intrusive at times, observing their daily lives with care and tenderness, yet never shying away from heartbreak.
The film opens in the 1980s—our “present day”—introducing us to Noor (Muhammed Abed Elrahman) and his friend as they race through the streets in a burst of youthful chaos. They chase, joke, and roughhouse as teenagers do, until their momentum is abruptly halted by a protest unfolding before them. Noor, energized and impulsive, is drawn in immediately, while his friend urges caution, pleading with him to head home. In the confusion and noise, a gunshot rings out. The film cuts away just as quickly, pulling us back into Hanan’s voice as she prepares to rewind the story to its origins.
From the outset, it is clear that Dabis is handling this subject with the urgency and care it demands. The opening is frantic and kinetic, even playful at first, until it suddenly isn’t. She captures how easily two innocent teenagers can be swept into political unrest—not through intention, but proximity. The boundary between normalcy and danger is razor-thin, both metaphorically and geographically, and Dabis makes that transition feel disturbingly seamless.
Hanan then places us in Jaffa, 1948. Here we meet Sharif (Adam Bakri), a man living a full and prosperous life with his family as the owner of a thriving orange grove. He shares this life with his young son—Salim, whom we will later encounter as an adult. It is in this chapter that Dabis begins to excavate the foundational trauma inflicted upon the family following the outbreak of war and the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe,” referring to the 1948 forced displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel).
Watching Sharif lose his livelihood—and with it, his life’s work—is devastating. In a matter of moments, decades of labor and stability are erased. Yet Sharif is not portrayed as passive in the face of this destruction. He chooses to stay behind, to fight for what is his, sending his family to safety in Nablus while he remains. The cost of this decision is immense, but it plants the seed for everything that follows.
This moment establishes the intergenerational cycle of trauma, dispossession, and survival that defines the film’s structure. For Salim, Sharif represents defiance—a man unwilling to relinquish not only his land, but his belonging. The bond between Sharif and his family, particularly his son, is depicted as deeply rooted and loving, forming the emotional backbone upon which the next chapter is built.
We next find Salim in 1978, now living in a dilapidated refugee camp in the occupied West Bank with his wife, Hanan, and their young son, Noor (Sanad Alkabareti). An idealistic schoolteacher, Salim maintains warm, attentive relationships with those around him—his father, his wife, and especially his son. Dabis weaves in moments of domestic intimacy, allowing laughter and tenderness to coexist with the ever-present weight of unrest. Sharif’s past trauma lingers beneath the surface, but the family’s present-day reality carries its own scars, which soon rise to the forefront.
SPOILERS AHEAD
One of the film’s most harrowing sequences occurs when Salim and Noor are stopped by Israeli soldiers while attempting to return home during an unexpected curfew. The scene is excruciating to watch—humiliating, tense, and deliberately prolonged—but it is essential to Dabis’s thesis. The encounter fractures something fundamental between father and son.
Rather than bonding them, the experience drives a wedge between Salim and Noor. Noor interprets his father’s compliance as weakness, internalizing a sense of shame and humiliation. In contrast, he gravitates toward his grandfather, whose defiant spirit feels more aligned with Noor’s emerging understanding of resistance. Noor is too young to grasp the impossible calculus his father is forced to make: swallowing one’s pride in exchange for survival. And he should never have to bear that burden in the first place.
Dabis carefully traces the ideological ripple effect across three generations. Sharif’s pride and willingness to fight cost him time with his family and fundamentally alter who he becomes upon his return. Salim, shaped by that absence, is idealistic yet cautious, striving to balance moral conviction with the responsibility of keeping his family alive. The curfew encounter pushes him to his limits, forcing him to confront how resistance can look radically different depending on circumstance.
Noor, meanwhile, recoils from what he perceives as submission, clinging instead to the mythology of defiance embodied by his grandfather. This internal conflict propels the film into its next phase, focusing more closely on Noor’s teenage years.
As previously established, the line between ordinary life and rebellion during this period is perilously thin. Protest and resistance bleed into daily existence, particularly for young people coming of age under occupation. The escalation toward the film’s emotional and narrative climax is swift and devastating—subtly foreshadowed in the opening moments we initially witnessed.
The introductory sequence ultimately confirms what it only hinted at before: Noor has been shot. From this point forward, the film shifts perspective, moving away from Noor’s youthful idealism and toward the crushing guilt and grief experienced by his parents. They blame themselves, each in different ways, for the outcome they now face.
Dabis underscores the cruelty of bureaucracy as Salim and Hanan navigate the procedural nightmare of securing medical care for their critically injured son. Permits, checkpoints, and permissions delay what should be immediate intervention. The absurdity of it all is infuriating and inhumane, and the audience is left to wait alongside them, powerless and enraged by the military structures that dictate life and death.
The moral dilemma that follows is perhaps the film’s most devastating. Once Noor is finally hospitalized—his parents approved to see him, permits begrudgingly granted—an Israeli nurse approaches Salim and Hanan about organ donation. The request is staggering. Not only have they already endured a previous organ donation loss, but this time the appeal comes from the very system responsible for their son’s condition.
Dabis allows these moments to breathe, stretching out Salim and Hanan’s deliberation in a way that mirrors the emotional paralysis they experience. Vengeance feels justified, even inevitable, after generations of loss and displacement. Yet it is Hanan who articulates the film’s most profound assertion: the choice to preserve one’s humanity, even when everything has been taken.
When hope for Noor is finally extinguished, the grief lands with unbearable weight. It is then revealed that Hanan has been recounting this entire story to Ari, the recipient of Noor’s heart. In their conversation, Hanan fiercely asserts her son’s identity, insisting that Noor’s heart remains Palestinian, regardless of the body it now inhabits.
In a cruel irony, Ari explains that the heart transplant prevented him from serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. Dabis layers this revelation with both political and symbolic resonance. The family has lost their land, their home, their dignity—and now, even the physical remnants of their son. Yet Noor’s heart, transplanted into Ari, becomes an instrument of refusal. A Palestinian heart, quite literally, prevents further participation in the machinery that caused this suffering.
Seen through Hanan’s perspective—and eventually Salim’s—the choice of love and humanity becomes a radical act. It is their chosen weapon in a struggle defined by violence, erasure, and survival.
In the film’s final moments, set in 2022, Salim and Hanan return to the site of their former home, now replaced by commercial stalls. They wander through what remains of their past before settling near a body of water, basking quietly in the sun together. There is no triumph here, only endurance.
All That’s Left of You stands among the most affecting historical dramas I’ve seen in recent years, particularly in its examination of political turmoil and the emotional inheritance passed between parents and children. Dabis captures profoundly intimate family moments across multiple timelines while never losing sight of the broader systems of oppression shaping them. Though deeply sensitive and painfully topical, it is a film that demands to be witnessed—for the sake of understanding what these families have endured, and continue to endure.
Dabis approaches this material with care, precision, and emotional honesty, allowing moments of levity to exist alongside unflinching darkness, much as they do in life. The film is difficult to sit with, but that difficulty pales in comparison to the realities it depicts—realities that persist to this day. Spanning generations and shifting perspectives, All That’s Left of You ties its threads together as gracefully as possible under impossible conditions, leaving behind a portrait of resilience, grief, and radical humanity.