“All That’s Left of You,” an absorbing, decades-spanning family drama by the Palestinian American director, screenwriter, and actress Cherien Dabis, begins at speed. Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman), a teen-age boy living in the occupied West Bank in 1988, playfully chases a buddy over a rooftop and down a street. Amid much everyday hustle and bustle, goosed by jittery editing, jolting camerawork, and anxious percussion, Noor catches up to his friend just in time for both boys to get sucked into a gathering protest. It’s early on in the first intifada. An Israeli soldier fires a bullet, Noor falls ominously out of frame, and the film abruptly cuts to another time and place, with a closeup of Noor’s mother, Hanan (played by Dabis). “I’m here to tell you who is my son,” she tells us. “But, for you to understand, I must tell you what happened to his grandfather.”
Does your heart sink? Mine did, at first. But although the teasing, in-medias-res prologue may be a bit of a gimmick, Dabis gives it a sly multigenerational twist and a historically charged sense of purpose. “All That’s Left of You” is a three-act drama spanning nearly eight decades in the lives of a family from the coastal city of Jaffa, in what was once Palestine, where Noor’s grandfather Sharif (Adam Bakri) owned a large house and a thriving orange grove. The first act unfolds in 1948, near the start of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” as Zionist militias forced Palestinians to leave their homes. As explosions rock Jaffa and the family’s idyllic, prosperous way of life crumbles overnight, Sharif sends his wife, Munira (Maria Zreik), and their children to stay with relatives in the West Bank. He remains behind, where, despite efforts to negotiate with Israeli forces, he is apprehended, stripped of his property, and forced into manual labor, before he manages to reunite with his loved ones.
The second act picks up in 1978 and focusses on Sharif’s son Salim (Saleh Bakri), who lives in the West Bank with his wife, Hanan, the woman we saw at the outset, and their kids, including Noor (played as a child by Sanad Alkabareti). Sharif, now an old man (played by Mohammad Bakri), lives with them, his memory addled yet returning obsessively to the loss of his homeland. (A moving touch: Adam and Saleh Bakri are Mohammad Bakri’s sons.) One day, Salim endures abuse from Israeli soldiers and earns the scorn of Noor, who is radicalized both by his grandfather’s trauma and his father’s apparent cowardice. In ten years’ time, the boy will become that fast-running teen-ager in 1988, and the third act will plunge us into the sad aftermath of the protest, confronting Salim and Hanan with both a medical emergency and a moral crisis. The everyday realities of life under the occupation, including the hassles and harassments of bureaucratic delays and security checkpoints, can suddenly become matters of life and death.
This is the first feature that Dabis has directed since “May in the Summer” (2014), an uneven wedding-themed comedy in which she played a Jordanian American bride-to-be. Before that, she made a winning début feature, “Amreeka” (2009), about a Palestinian single mom trying to make a new life for herself and her teen-age son in Illinois. Her new film forgoes cross-cultural humor in favor of an anguished Arab-Israeli history lesson, which stretches from the violent uprootings of 1948 to the eerie calm of 2022, about a year before the attacks of October 7, 2023. (The film itself was originally supposed to be shot in Palestine, but the war in Gaza forced the production to relocate to Greece, Cyprus, and Jordan.)
Dabis’s diagrammatically structured screenplay is built on clear historical parallels and tidy intergenerational contrasts. A young boy adores his father, yet grows up to be despised by his own son. Political rage seems to ebb and flow with each generation. All three major male characters experience Israeli settler violence, the consequences of which are brutal, whether they resist or comply. Dabis embraces the conventions of melodrama with sombre grace. As a director, she orchestrates scenes of separation, discord, and shattering loss with an emotional restraint that’s equally evident in the way she plays the role of Hanan.
Every family may hand down its share of struggles and traumas, but Dabis’s movie suggests that Palestinians living under the yoke of occupation must deal with an especially cruel and binding inheritance. If the story has a principal flaw, it’s that we don’t get enough of a sense of the young man Noor becomes—or of the state of his relationship with his parents—before the events of the third act set in, a deficiency that nonetheless bears out the movie’s point: Noor’s struggles are so closely tied to those of his family that it’s as if he doesn’t even have the luxury of his own fully formed identity. In the end, Salim and Hanan are tasked with some agonizingly significant decisions on their son’s behalf, and “All That’s Left of You” probes those decisions with understated gravity and nuance. The final passages, built around a series of journeys across endlessly contested and coveted terrain, force Salim and Hanan to consider the religious, ethical, medical, and societal implications of a selfless act—and to consider whether that act will, in the unknowable long run, make the world better or worse for the ones they love.
Dabis’s film slipped into U.S. theatres the same week as a more tightly focussed, attention-grabbing tale of Palestinian tragedy, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” which reduced audiences to tears when it played, last fall, at the Venice International Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize there. The movie, which was written and directed by the Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, is as complete an antithesis to Dabis’s one as could be imagined. “All That’s Left of You” sweeps through generations over nearly two and a half hours; “The Voice of Hind Rajab” is a drama ripped from the headlines that compresses the events of a single day into a taut eighty-nine minutes. The crucial difference between the two films is not just temporal, however, but also formal. Whereas Dabis works in a key of staid, forthright classicism, Ben Hania is bent on shaking up convention, as she did in her previous feature, the metafictional documentary hybrid “Four Daughters” (2023). In her new film, she uses elements of both fiction and nonfiction, and sets them in daring oil-and-water opposition.
The events in question are horrific and well documented. On January 29, 2024, as Israel bombarded Gaza, a five-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, was in a car with her aunt, uncle, and four cousins trying to flee their neighborhood in Gaza City. An Israeli tank fired on the vehicle, killing everyone inside except Hind and a teen-age cousin, who survived long enough to speak with a dispatcher, Omar Alqam, at a Palestine Red Crescent Society emergency-call center. Over the next several hours, Alqam and his colleagues remained on the line with Hind and arranged for an ambulance to rescue her—a process that necessitated a long wait to secure the Israeli military’s approval. But after the approval was granted the Army shelled the ambulance as it approached the vehicle. Twelve days later, on February 10, 2024, Hind and her relatives, along with two paramedics, Yousef Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, were all found dead at the scene.
In the months that followed, Hind Rajab’s death ignited protests nationwide, and she has become a powerful symbol of the more than sixty-four thousand Palestinian children who have been killed or injured by Israeli attacks since October, 2023. After Ben Hania heard the story, that February, she leapt into action, and the result, the following year, was “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” The film confines its action almost entirely to the P.R.C.S. call center, where a fictionalized version of Omar (Motaz Malhees) tries to keep young Hind on the line. We see Omar argue repeatedly and furiously with a hardheaded supervisor, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), who refuses to send the ambulance before completing the requisite coördination—a term wielded with the utmost irony—with the Israeli military. We see Omar work closely with a sympathetic fellow-dispatcher, Rana (Saja Kilani), who tries to calm and comfort the young girl as best she can.
During the call, we do not see the tanks, the fired-upon car, the bodies and bloodstained seats, or the trapped, terrified young girl crying out from within. This is, of course, a mercy. It’s also a self-imposed limitation, and it positions “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” for all the specific extremity of its horror, within the increasingly well-worn movie subgenre of the control-room thriller. Here, acts of mass killing are kept at a strict visual remove, and our attention is focussed on a group of hardworking professionals, desperate to beat the clock and mitigate an impossible situation. This subgenre comes with a built-in high-mindedness, predicated on the assumption that, for a filmmaker trying to dramatize violence without exploiting it, the denial of visual information—and the attendant removal of a perspective—amounts to the purest, most artful, most scrupulous representational tactic. Less is more, the logic goes; best to let the viewer’s alarm and imagination do the rest.
“Fail Safe” (1964) remains perhaps the best, and best-known, example of this subgenre; more recent examples, such as “A House of Dynamite” (2025) and “September 5” (2024), with their self-important shows of verisimilitude, suggest that the concept has begun to calcify into cliché. “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” too, strikes me as a relentlessly harrowing but finally unpersuasive experience, one that doesn’t meet the exacting standard of realism that it imposes upon itself. Ben Hania researched her scenario carefully, interviewing the real-life Alqam and his colleagues. Her film is an honorable attempt to dramatize the everyday agonies and frustrations of Red Crescent workers, to honor their quick thinking and astonishing courage under duress. Too often, though, she resorts to scenes of exposition and clarification—as when Mahdi rebuffs Omar by showing him photographs of all the paramedics they’ve lost—that, whether or not they are drawn from the historical record, seem contrived more for the benefit of our understanding than that of the characters. The workplace dramas intended to animate Hind’s story wind up distracting from it.
I haven’t yet touched on the film’s boldest conceptual gambit—the reason that viewers have left the film so shattered, and also the reason, I suspect, that Ben Hania felt spurred to tell this story to begin with. We do not see Hind Rajab—apart from brief snapshots of her in happier times—but, as the movie explicitly informs us, that is in fact Hind Rajab’s real voice, recorded from her actual call, that we hear. We are not listening to a young actor’s impression; those are Hind’s unfeigned cries and whimpers, her desperate pleas for help. The film wields this voice—used with the permission of Hind’s surviving family—as unimpeachable, unignorable evidence. Here, it says, is archival proof of atrocities that too many people, unwilling to let themselves be troubled by the Palestinian plight, have dismissed as either an exaggerated statistic or a necessary evil.
Cinematic history is filled with examples, some more successful than others, of filmmakers creating dramas based on traumatic real events and interpolating raw documentary material to impart a sense of authenticity. Allan Dwan spliced actual Second World War combat footage into “Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949). Ryan Coogler kicked off his fact-based drama “Fruitvale Station” (2013), about the fatal police shooting of a restrained and unarmed Black man, with cellphone footage from the real-life incident. But Ben Hania is after more than glancing interpolations of the truth; she wants us to sit with Hind Rajab’s voice, to absorb the devastating final moments of her young life. It’s an audacious and worthy impulse—which makes it all the more mystifying that, having decided to make use of such a device, Ben Hania should mishandle the audio so brazenly, by placing it on such direct footing with staged material that, in terms of writing and acting, runs from competent to amateurish.
The idea, I suspect, was to insure that Hind’s story receives as wide and mainstream an airing as possible. But would even the biggest box-office bump justify such roughshod mistreatment of primary material? The result feels like a cavalier stunt—an audio-documentary shrine erected on a wobbly visual-narrative foundation. Reality can be a potent tool, but the priorities of fiction create their own hierarchies. “The Voice of Hind Rajab” ultimately overpowers the voice of Hind Rajab. ♦
