'All That's Left of You' Courtesy of Sundance Institute Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Cherien Dabis' All That's Left of You is both intimate and epic. The third film from the actor/director is a sweeping family saga that covers three generations of history and struggle, from 1948 through to the present day, through the lens of a single Palestinian family. For Dabis, a Palestinian American filmmaker best known for his 2009 debut Amreeka and as an actor, for her work on Ozark and Only Murders in the Building, the story is deeply personal, inspired by her father's exile in 1967 and his lifelong grief over a homeland he could visit only on a foreign passport. Related Stories Movies Sigourney Weaver Talks 'Avatar,' Legacy of 'Alien' Films: "Amazing to Me How Influential Ripley Has Been" Business One Fewer Buyer? Warner Bros. Deal Rattles Producers Up North She spent years "marinating" the script before finally writing it in 2020. Financing came together quickly and she was ready to shoot, on location in Palestine, when October 7 happened. The war in Gaza upended the production, which ended up moving to Cyprus, Jordan, and Greece, with cast and crew working in "a state of total crisis." All That's Left of You premiered to raves at Sundance and was picked by Jordan to be its official Oscar contender for the best international feature category. But U.S. distributors, perhaps concerned about the political repercussions, balked at the film. "Every mainstream distributor essentially backed away," she says. Eventually, Dabis decided to go it on her own. She set up a standalone distribution company, Visiblity Films, and, together with upstart distributor Watermelon Pictures, is co-releasing the movie stateside, kicking off with an awards-season run on Dec. 5. All That's Left of You is one of four films in this year's international feature races focused on the Palestinian experience. It joins Palestine's official Oscar entry, Palestine 36, directed by Annemarie Jacir, a period drama set during the 1936-39 Arab revolt; Tunisia's contender The Voice of Hind Rajab, from Kaouther Ben Hania, a harrowing real-life tale of a young Palestinian girl killed in Gaza by Israel soldiers; and The Sea, Israel's submission, directed by Shai Carmeli-Pollak, which follows a 12-year-old Palestinian boy from the West Bank who risks his life to go to the beach for the first time in Tel Aviv. Dabis spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about shooting an "11-month crisis production" across four countries, transforming her father's inherited trauma into art, and why she's embracing a direct artist-to-audience model for Palestinian stories, saying, "This is the least that I could do. This is what I must do." How long had you been thinking about this story, and how did the film come together? I've been thinking about the story for a very long time. In 2014, after I made my first two features, I felt I was ready to make the big film that I've been wanting to make for a long time. I spent a while marinating on the script. I bought a notebook and just wrote down ideas for scenes and themes, putting in all these different things, the kind of characters, the story arcs, and so on. Eventually, I came up with a structure. And then the first image, the first scenes. Then I started writing. That was in 2020. When I sat down to start writing, it all kind of flowed out of me. It was one of the easiest things I've ever written. Which is crazy. But considering I'd been thinking about it for so long, maybe it's not crazy. I took it out in 2021, and amazingly, it came together really fast. I was shocked. By 2023, we were financed, not fully-financed but well on the way, and I went into pre-production. That was in May of 2023. It all came together in two years. I kind of couldn't believe it. But I felt, even at that time, that people were really looking for these stories and were more open to the Palestinian perspective. Then, October of 2023 happened, and that made the story all the more urgent and important. What happened to your production after the events of October 7, the attacks, and the war that followed? We had prepped the entire film there (in Palestine). I was in Jaffa, and then production moved to Al-Birah, which is in the West Bank, and I spent five months on the ground, working with my local crew. We were planning to shoot all over the country: In three different cities in the West Bank, then Haifa and Tel Aviv/Jaffa. We had done all the work. We'd found all of our locations, done all the casting. We'd amassed a giant warehouse of really beautifully crafted, carefully curated props from all of the different time periods and then...
October 7th. We had to flee. We were in Ramallah and within three days, we knew we had to get out. We were hearing fighter jets. The