One of our favorite films to premiere at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You was recently selected by the country of Jordan as its official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards. Now set by Watermelon Pictures and Visibility Films for an awards qualifying theatrical run in Los Angeles beginning November 28, followed by a release in select cities on January 9, Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo have joined as executive producers and the first trailer has arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “In the Occupied West Bank of the 1980s, a Palestinian teenager is swept into a protest that changes the course of his family’s life. Reeling from its aftermath, his mother, Hanan, shares the story that led them to that fateful moment. Spanning seven decades, this epic drama traces the hopes and heartaches of one uprooted family, revealing not only the scars of displacement, but the unbreakable spirit of survival.”
John Fink said in his review, “A sprawling, gripping drama that starts with the foundation of the state of Israel and the displacement of Palestinian families in Jaffa, then ends two years shy of the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You considers generational trauma on both an intimate and epic scale. Following more than seven decades in the life of the Hammad family, orange-growers who were expelled from their land in Jaffa in 1948, the film is a gateway to understanding decades of Palestinian trauma borne of the immense Jewish trauma of the Holocaust. The film ultimately grows from anger into a call for reconciliation, with a moving ending that does not diminish either generational trauma but lands in a place of surprising nuance.”
See the trailer below.
