All That’s Left of You (Ally Baqi Mink) is not a film you casually put on. It’s the kind of movie that asks something of you your attention, your patience, your emotional availability and then quietly dares you to look away. Even as writer-director Cherien Dabis works squarely within the grammar of narrative fiction, the film unfolds as a bruising, deeply felt historical drama, one that peers into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not through headlines or ideology, but through the long memory of a single family. This is a story shaped by the Nakba, haunted by it, still bleeding from wounds inflicted more than seventy years ago. You can feel that history pressing down on every frame.
The opening arrives without warning, dropped into motion rather than exposition. Two teenage boys run through a West Bank settlement, breathless, energized, half-playing, half-fleeing. A protest erupts. Chaos follows. A shot rings out. One of the boys falls. At first, we’re denied the comfort of context we don’t know who’s been hit, or why this moment matters until Dabis herself steps forward, breaking the fourth wall. Playing Hanan, she addresses us directly, explaining that the heart of this film is not simply what happened, but who her son is. It’s an arresting move, intimate and disarming, and it immediately reframes the violence not as spectacle, but as consequence.
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From there, the film rewinds to Jaffa in 1948, and something shifts. The storytelling settles into a chronological rhythm, tracing the reverberations of the Nakba across decades through 1978, 1988, and finally 2022 as Hanan’s family moves through time carrying inherited trauma like an invisible heirloom. The family at the center of the story is fictional, but nothing about their experience feels invented. Dabis draws directly from lived history, grounding the film in real events, real fears, real losses. She does not shield the audience from the daily violence Palestinians endured during displacement and colonization beatings, bombings, terror nor does she simplify the moral complexity of survival. Many families, we’re shown, didn’t fight back not out of passivity, but out of fear. The imbalance of power was crushingly clear.
Moments of calm, when they appear, are fragile and fleeting. They’re swallowed almost immediately by bomb blasts that have become so regular they barely register anymore. At one point, a character remarks, almost casually, “We get used to it. It’s almost like Beethoven’s symphony.” The line lands with a sickening chill. The idea that destruction could become background noise is horrifying enough but Dabis’s staging makes it unbearable. The screams of children echo and linger, not just in the theater, but somewhere deeper, inside you. Sitting there, it’s hard not to wonder how such suffering became normalized. Harder still to avoid asking how it continues.
And yet, as relentless as the physical violence is, All That’s Left of You is ultimately more concerned with the quieter, more insidious forms of harm. Psychological violence seeps into every corner of the story the daily stripping away of dignity, the bureaucratic mechanisms designed to erase humanity one small humiliation at a time. One of the film’s most devastating scenes captures this with brutal clarity. Hanan’s husband, Salim (played with aching restraint by Saleh Bakri), is detained by Israeli soldiers. A gun is trained on him and his young son, Noor. The soldiers order Salim to repeat degrading phrases calling himself worthless, insulting his wife all in front of his child, if he wants to live.
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Salim complies. He believes he’s protecting Noor, sparing him the trauma of watching his father die. But Noor doesn’t see it that way. To the boy, the submission feels like betrayal. That misunderstanding becomes a fissure the family never fully repairs. When Noor later calls his father a “traitor,” the word lands like a curse. Dabis cuts forward to 1988, and what follows feels inevitable in the most tragic sense. Suddenly, the opening scene snaps into focus. We know who those boys were. We know what’s coming. And the film doesn’t rush the realization it lets the weight of it settle.
From there, Dabis turns her attention to administrative violence, the slow cruelty of systems that pretend to offer rights while ensuring they’re nearly impossible to access. It recalls the suffocating bureaucratic nightmare depicted in Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. Here, the process of securing permission to transport a Palestinian patient to an Israeli hospital because the local West Bank facility lacks even a CT scanner becomes its own form of torture. Paperwork loops endlessly. Approvals stall. Time drains away. You don’t need the film to spell out what this delay means. You already know, in your gut, that by the time permission comes if it ever does it will be too late.
What happens afterward deepens the film in unexpected ways. Rather than collapsing into despair, Dabis finds room for moral complexity, for unexpected compassion, for choices that refuse easy judgment. It’s here that her humanity as a filmmaker becomes most evident. She builds relationships that feel lived-in and textured, reminding us that the trauma of the Nakba doesn’t belong solely to history books it’s carried forward, embedded in families, passed down like memory and scar tissue. Dabis is widely known for her television work on Ramy, Only Murders in the Building, and Ozark, but this film makes a persuasive case that her feature work deserves just as much attention.
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Her direction is patient and deeply empathetic. She allows characters to fully exist before tragedy alters their paths, which makes those turns all the more painful. As an actor, she matches that sensitivity, giving Hanan a quiet, layered presence, especially in the film’s most devastating moments. Dabis never instructs the audience how to feel. She doesn’t underline emotions or force catharsis. Instead, she invites us to sit with these people to watch them wrestle with decisions whose consequences will echo long after the moment passes, perhaps even shaping history in small, unseen ways.
At the core of the film lies a decision moral, ethical, religious faced by Hanan and Salim. Dabis wisely refuses to reduce it to a message or a thesis. Whatever choice they make will follow them for the rest of their lives, even as they continue forward, clinging to the fragile hope that things might improve, even as time itself becomes uncertain.
The film does begin to stretch near its epilogue, set in a quasi-present day. Watching Hanan and Salim return to a transformed Jaffa a place altered beyond recognition, yet still undeniably theirs carries a bittersweet heaviness, though the sequence lingers slightly longer than necessary. Still, it hardly diminishes the film’s impact. The final image is one that stays with you, quietly devastating and quietly defiant, a visual expression of endurance under relentless oppression.
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This is not an easy film. It may well be one of the hardest watches of the year. But it’s also among the most necessary, and perhaps the most urgent. It’s understandable if some viewers choose to keep their distance the violence here is layered, relentless, and emotionally exhausting. Yet if you’re able to encounter All That’s Left of You in a space where you feel safe enough to absorb it, the experience will not leave you. Some films entertain. Some educate. This one bears witness and once you’ve seen it, it’s impossible to unsee.
Detailed Content Breakdown for Parents
Violence & Intensity: The film contains frequent and emotionally heavy depictions of military violence tied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Viewers see armed soldiers, shootings, bombings, and civilians caught in protests. A teenager is shot early in the story, and guns are repeatedly pointed at unarmed adults and children. The violence is not graphic in a gory sense, but it is realistic, abrupt, and deeply distressing. Much of the impact comes from the sense of constant threat and powerlessness rather than explicit imagery.
Language: There is very little casual profanity, but the film includes moments of intense verbal humiliation. In one disturbing scene, a man is forced at gunpoint to insult himself and make degrading statements about his wife in front of his child. These lines are intentionally abusive and meant to convey psychological torture, not shock value, but they may be upsetting for younger viewers.
Sexual Content / Nudity: There is no nudity or sexual activity in the film. However, one verbal insult referencing sexual behavior is used as part of a broader act of humiliation. It is not sexualized, but it is emotionally disturbing due to the context in which it occurs.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: Drug use is not present, and alcohol or smoking, if shown at all, is minimal and incidental. Substance use is not a theme of the film and does not factor into the story in any meaningful way.
All That’s Left of You, Jordan’s official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, opens in U.S. theaters through Watermelon Pictures on January 9, 2026. The film will arrive in UK and Irish cinemas via TAPE Collective on February 6, with a preview screening at BFI Southbank on January 21
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