Family drama hits earnest notes

Palestinian drama ‘All That’s Left of You’ examines emotional toll of occupation.

- Review TIM GRIERSON

"ALL THAT'S Left of You" takes the audience through four crucial periods in the lives of the Hammad family — 1948, 1978, 1988 and 2022.

(Watermelon Pictures)

Near the start of “All That’s Left of You,” an elderly mother addresses the camera, her eyes melancholy but her face determined.

“I'm here to tell you who is my son,” she explains. “But for you to understand, I must tell you what happened to his grandfather.”

The woman, Hanan, is played by Palestinian American writer-director Cherien Dabis, whose third feature spans more than 70 years of Palestinian history, told through the prism of one family and three generations of its men. Occasionally undone by melodramatic tendencies, “All That's Left of You” catalogs the emotional toll that occupation visits on the oppressed. Her heartfelt film can be overly dutiful, but underneath one detects the filmmaker’s complicated feelings regarding Israel's ongoing treatment of Palestine, wavering between defiance and empathy, despair and resilience.