All That’s Left of You, screening at Unseen Nairobi throughout July
Cherien Dabis opens her third feature with a boy running across a West Bank rooftop, then loses him at a protest before we’ve had time to learn his name. Before we can process what’s happened, her own character turns to the camera and speaks directly to us: to understand what has just occurred, she says, you first need to know what happened to his grandfather. That’s the shape of the whole film. A wound in the present, then a long walk back through the family history that produced it.
“I am here to tell you how it started.” – Hanan (Cherien Dabis)
All That’s Left of You traces the Hammad family across four decades, opening in 1948 Jaffa, where a comfortable household living among orange groves is bombed out of its home and scattered toward Beirut and the West Bank. From there the film moves through the 1970s, the 1980s and into the 2020s, following one family’s line through occupation, imprisonment, protest, and grief. Dabis wrote, directed, produced and stars in it, playing Hanan opposite Saleh Bakri as her husband Salim. The elder generation is played by the late Mohammad Bakri, with his real son Adam Bakri playing the same character as a younger man, and it’s clever casting. It’s the kind of casting choice that quietly deepens everything the film is trying to say about inheritance.
The production itself carries its own history. It was meant to begin shooting in Palestine, and the crew had to evacuate before filming started because of the war in Gaza, relocating instead to Cyprus, Greece and Jordan. That displacement, folded into a film about displacement, is hard to set aside once you know it.
What struck me the most watching it, was the craft. Dabis and cinematographer Christopher Aoun shoot in wide, patient frames, letting a drone shot linger on the meeting of the Mediterranean and the Jaffa skyline, or holding on a family dinner as it tips from celebration into mourning without ever cutting away. Televisions in the background carry the news of each era, so history keeps arriving in the room even when the story is focused on something as small as a father trying to reach his son. The film asks a lot of its actors in return, and Bakri and Dabis carry the back half of it on performances that stay controlled even as the material pushes toward rage and collapse.
It isn’t a tidy watch… The first act plays a little like a history lesson pitched at an audience that’s never encountered this story before, and the ending resolves things a touch more neatly than the two hours before it earned. But the film gathers real power as it moves, and by the time it reaches Hanan and Salim in the present day, waiting on news of their son, it’s stopped feeling like an argument and started feeling like a family. It premiered at Sundance last year, picked up the Audience Award at Sydney, and went on to become Jordan’s submission for this year’s Academy Awards, where it made the December shortlist.
At Unseen Nairobi, expect the usual rooftop rhythm: the film, then the city skyline and a drink afterward, which for something this heavy might be exactly the right way to sit with it. It’s a long watch at 145 minutes and a demanding one, but it earns both.
The hibiscus gin fizz will go a long way. <3
Take someone you can talk to.
All That’s Left of You screens at Unseen Nairobi throughout July.
Tickets and showtimes via Mookh.
