All That’s Left of You, Palestinian American film-maker Cherien Dabis’s wrenching portrait of intergenerational trauma, begins its 75-year tale of displacement as the great epics do, in medias res.
A teenage boy chases a friend through the narrow streets of Nablus, a blur of surefooted youth amid the sun-bleached, nobly dilapidated homes. In a series of kinetic, precise shots, Dabis sketches a vibrant map of the occupied West Bank in the late 80s, where humiliation and hope coexist in a dangerous pressure cooker. Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) bounds from an auntie’s kitchen to a bustling fruit market to a protest against Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint; he summarily joins the chant of intifada (“uprising”). Then, the soldiers open fire.
