‘All That’s Left Of You’ Writer-Director-Star Cherien Dabis On Jordan’s Generations-Spanning Oscar Submission: “It Was Inspired By My Family” – Contenders International

There’s an unintended irony in the title of Cherien Dabis’s Oscar entry, a decades-spanning saga involving three generations of a Palestinian family, starting with their displacement by the Israelis in 1948.

“We’d intended to shoot the film in Palestine,” said Dabis, speaking at Deadline’s Contenders Film: International event. “In fact, I landed in Palestine in May of 2023 and began prepping the film with my crew on the ground there. I spent almost five months there. We were two weeks away from shooting when the events of October 2023 stopped us in our tracks and forced us to flee and essentially evacuate. Of course, we had no idea that the situation would just escalate and escalate, and we were never able to return.”

With its locations all but destroyed, the production was forced to relocate to Jordan, which explains why All That’s Left of You is representing the country in its Oscar bid. “It was tremendously painful to have to leave behind five months of incredible hard work,” Dabis said. “We had begun construction on our locations. We had amassed a giant warehouse of beautifully crafted, carefully curated props and set dressing from all of the time periods, and we had to leave behind our Palestinian crew, [though] I tried to bring as many of them with us as I could to the places where we ended up shooting.”

The story, Dabis said, came from a very personal place. “I think it all began with just the idea of covering three generations of one family, to show kind of the passage of trauma and to really explore this collective trauma [of 1948] that we Palestinians call the Nakba. And that idea really came from me observing my own family. It was inspired by my family, and my father in particular, who’s Palestinian and was exiled in 1967. I grew up feeling his longing for this place where he could no longer live, where he needed permission just to visit. It took him many years to get foreign citizenship just to be able to return to visit his family.”

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She added: “I grew up watching him harassed, and humiliated at borders and checkpoints whenever we’d go back to visit. And I also became more and more aware, as I got older, of how much the situation impacted him emotionally, how much it really formed his identity, how he became more and more disillusioned as time went on, how he became angry at the deteriorating situation in his homeland.”

To hear more, check out the panel here.