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.