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Joy Inside My Tears:
An Interview with Cherien Dabis (All That’s Left of You)
By Marya Gates

Inspired in part by her own family history, the multi-generational epic All That's Left of You is the film that writer-director-star Cherien Dabis has been working towards her entire career. The drama follows three generations of one Palestinian family (played in part by real-life acting family Saleh Bakri, Adam Bakri, and the late Mohammad Bakri) through several marked periods in the country's history, including the Nakba in 1948, the Israeli occupation after 1967, and the First Intifada in 1988. Although her film tackles a serious political subject, she infuses her story with heart and pockets of familial joy.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, to a father of Palestinian descent anda mother from Jordan, Dabis grew up in Celina, Ohio, and spent her summers visiting Jordan. When she was eight, she visited Palestine for the time, and her family was held at the Israeli border for twelve hours, she and her sisters strip-searched. This incident left an impact on Dabis, who did not return to Palestine for another 20 years.

A humanist at heart, Dabis has used film to reach audiences across the globe through films that explore the complexity of the Palestinian diaspora. After receiving a B.A. in creative writing and communications from the University of Cincinnati and an M.F.A. in film from Columbia University, Dabis participated in the Sundance Institute’s Middle East Screenwriter’s Lab and the Cannes Film Festival’s inaugural Mediterranean Films Crossing Borders program. Her debut feature film Amreeka (2009), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and later screened at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize. In 2022, she received an Emmy nomination for her work directing episodes of the comedy series Only Murders in the Building.

After its premiere at Sundance, All That's Left of You screened at dozens of film festivals across the globe and was chosen as Jordan's entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards. Ahead of its Sundance premiere last January, I spoke with Dabis over Zoom about the long process of developing her epic film, the poetry of the Arabic language, how the genocide in Gaza interrupted the film’s production, and her goal of centering the humanity—and humor—of Palestinian families.

Reserve Shot: What was the initial kernel for this film?

Cherien Dabis: I wanted for so long to tell a multi-generational family story, and I just didn't know how. In some ways, I always kind of knew I wanted to tell a Palestinian origin story. Those two things were the same to me. I knew the Palestinian origin story would be told through a multi-generational family story, somewhat inspired by my own family. My dad became a refugee in 1967 and has lived most of his life in forced exile, which is why I was born and raised mostly in the U.S. We traveled back to Palestine a lot, so I had my own experiences there. I witnessed things. Obviously, my experience is pale in comparison to those of the people who live there, but I got a little window into certain things.

My first memory of traveling there was visiting our native village when I was eight, and we were held at the border for twelve hours. Soldiers went through all of our things. They ordered us to be strip searched, including my baby sisters. It was this really scary moment. My dad confronted them. They screamed at him. I thought they were going to kill him. And so I had these experiences that I knew I wanted to make sense of for myself. And aside from my own experiences, there were all these stories that I had heard growing up that in some way were transmuted so deeply that they almost became my memories. Basically, it is intergenerational trauma, where you know your family members lived a past that is so traumatic that it overshadows your present, and so you're living with this stuff that's not yours, and all of these stories.

RS: In your Palestine Film Institute dialogue with Noura Erakat, you mentioned that you were already working on this film. How long was the writing process?

CD: For a long time, I just wondered why other people didn't know about these things. Around ten years ago I started really thinking that I was ready. It was after I made my first two features where I really felt ready to do something larger in scope. I knew how to tell this Palestinian origin story. So I started jotting down ideas. I immersed myself in research. I immersed myself in literature from different time periods. I just wanted to spend time familiarizing myself, and soon what I found was that ideas just started coming to me. So I started keeping a notebook and writing down these ideas.

The structure of the film was one of the first things that came to me, once I knew it was intergenerational, and then I decided to focus on trauma and wonder how it was passed from one generation to another? And is it possible to overcome it, especially when it's ongoing? When I started asking those questions, the structure of the film became clear to me for some reason, even before I started writing. Over the years, as ideas would come, I would jot them down. Then it wasn't until the pandemic that I actually found the time to sit down and start writing it. But by that time, I had done so much research, and I had so many ideas, and I knew the structure; it just kind of flowed out of me.

RS: At what point did you pick the years 1948, 1978, and 1988 to be the three main moments that we check in on this family?

CD: Two of those time periods were always clear to me, and 1948 is really the origin. Then 1988, because that's the First Intifada. I really wanted to look at, when you look at Palestinian history, how the trauma of what happened to people in 1948 passed to the nation that grew up in 1988, during the First Intifada. Those were the first time periods that I really knew. As for the 1970s, I wasn't really sure, but I also knew I didn't want to infuse every time period with so many political events, because I really wanted to focus the movie on the family. This is a very profoundly intimate, personal family story. So while certain dates are very important because of historical events, I wanted the 1970s to have less of that. I wanted for us to see a sense of normalcy with this family. But also, the 1970s was a time of occupation, although it is a little less obvious at first.

RS: Having watched a lot of documentaries made in the 1980s about Palestine, it seems that the younger generation who grew up under occupation fostered a hatred that isn't, I think, found in Salim's generation. There's more hope in him. They still think we can work this out. Then there is the generation of Noor, who grew up amidst occupation and violence. Was that something you were thinking about when you were writing those characters?

CD: I was definitely thinking about the different attitudes of the different generations. There is the generation of the grandfather, who's clinging to what he lost and clinging to the past and really unable to let go, which is something I've seen in my own family. Then there's the generation of Salim, who, in my own family, is more like the women in the film. The ones who are like, “No, this is not sustainable. No, there's got to be a way.” They are the ones who are really holding out hope and just believing that this can't last. Then you see that generation who grew up watching their parents’ idealistic fantasies, at least to them that's what it feels like. They think that their idealism didn't get us anywhere, and all they’re seeing is violence, and therefore I'm going to rebel. I wanted to explore the different attitudes and responses to some of the political events. I do think that has a lot to do with how trauma skips a generation. You see it go from the grandfather to the son.

RS: Were there any films that you studied to look at how other filmmakers were able to weave the two together? Or any literature that you studied to look at structure?

CD: You know, I really wanted to find films that were intergenerational and that could be good references, and at the time, I couldn't really find them. I possibly didn't do a deep enough dive. I ended up watching [Wang Xiaoshuai’s] So Long, My Son (2019), which is incredible. I ended up watching that after I wrote the script. I was so moved by that film. It was the kind of movie I was looking for when I was writing mine, but it was just being released to film festivals as I was writing. There are a lot of other intergenerational films, but for some reason, I couldn't find anything that I felt was relevant.

I did immerse myself more in literature and stories of Palestine in 1948 and 1967, and I found that to be more inspirational. But when I started writing this, I thought to myself that I was making something that I hadn’t seen before and I didn't want to be too influenced by anything else. At one point, actually, I was really terrified, because I didn’t know if this was going to work, but then I thought I’m just gonna go for it. I decided not to look too hard and to just move forward with what I felt emotionally worked for me, and with the hopes that, if it worked emotionally for me, it would work emotionally for other people.

Then it wasn't until I got closer to getting the movie made that I started to really dig and look for films. I will say that as I was writing, one of the movies that I thought about a lot was Moonlight (2016), because it is so remarkable in showing how these particular moments in someone's life shape who they become. I wanted something similar for my film, even though it's not one character—it's three different characters, grandfather, father and son—and the passage of trauma. I wanted to find the moment when their relationships changed and when they changed. Because Moonlight is also told in these three different phases, it was the one reference I remember holding on to as I was writing.

RS: A lot of characters come in and out of your film. In particular, I love the way that Layla is layered into the background, yet we watch her grow from a child to her wedding to her immigration to Canada. As you were crafting the story, did you come up with a family tree for Sharif's family and where they all landed after 1948?

CD: I did, but it's funny, I ended up doing that a little later. When I started writing, I always try to write in layers, so I wrote the main characters first. I focused on their relationships with each other, just trying to really get them, and then I'm working on the secondary characters, and then at a certain point I got to the more background characters, like Layla. I knew that we see Layla when she's young, we see her when she's a bride, then I wanted to clarify where she was going and where she was ending up. So the family tree happened late in the writing process. I would say I was even probably directing by that point, when I finally got to the place where I was like, okay, here's the family tree, here's how everyone fits together, here's where everyone ended up. I think that level of specificity came in when I put on the director's hat and we were planning out the scenes.

RS: I can picture exactly who Layla is in the 2020s. There's a lot of wonderful Palestinian female directors out in Canada, and I just picture Layla is one of them. That's my fan fiction. I know she's thriving in Canada.

CD: I love that.

RS: I wanted to ask about Egyptian poet Muhammad Hafiz Ibrahim's “I Am The Sea.” It's so beautiful. Arabic is such a poetic language. When did you know you wanted to use this poem as a bookend to show who Salim is as a kid and who he is as an old man?

CD: You know, I knew poetry. As you said, it's so important to the Arabic language. It is such a part of the Arabic language. And I wanted to show that, in general, Palestinians are incredibly educated. There's so many stories, even within my own family, of how important poetry was to people in the culture, you know, back when we had time to think about things like poetry and we weren't just struggling to survive. Of course, it's still important today. I'm not saying it's not, but there was a time where it was a much larger part of the fabric of our lives and our culture. I really wanted to find the right poet and the right poem, so I asked around a lot about poets who were popular at that time. I read a lot of poetry and this particular poem about the Arabic language I just found so beautiful and relevant. It's amazing that this poem existed in 1948 because it couldn't be more relevant today. The Arabic language is not taught and spoken as it once was. I think a lot of people, even in the Arab world, fear that it's a little bit of a dying language.

RS: Once you were moving towards production, you cast three actors from the Bakri family— Adam, Saleh, and the late Mohammad. What was the process of getting all three of them?

CD: Since the film is an intergenerational portrait of a family, I really wanted to work with a family. That was my dream, to have both an intergenerational portrait on screen and off screen. On top of that, Saleh was born in Jaffa, and he actually left Jaffa when he was five to go live in his father's village. So he felt very close to the story and to the film. When I first approached him, he wasn't available, so I almost didn't get him, but we ended up having to radically shift our production to a different location and shoot at a different time. One of the positive things that came out of that was that Saleh became available, and so I ended up being able to work with all three of the Bakris, which is really what I wanted, and it was such a gift. They're amazing. Each one is so different, and they each brought something so unique to each of their characters.

RS: There is a line towards the end of the film: “Your humanity is also resistance.” I loved how throughout the film, you have lots of little pockets of joy. You have the orange groves. You have the game of peekaboo that your character plays with her child. You have that scene where Noor cons his father into getting him ice cream. As you were writing, did you have a process of making sure you had a balance between the trauma and these moments that show humanity can persist?

CD: I didn't even have to think about that, because it's such a part of who I am as a filmmaker. Unfortunately, we Palestinians are politicized from the moment we're born, and I always rejected that. I wanted to be seen as a person and not a political issue. I feel the same way about my films. It's so important to me, knowing what people will likely project on us to portray who we actually are, authentically. Which is joyful and incredibly loving and warm and patient and all these other things. So I love that you called it pockets of joy. It's important to me, because this film is about grief and loss and trauma and some things that could be deemed heavy, but I never want to approach anything with a heaviness. I always want to balance that feeling with our humanity. All people, even when we're going through tremendous loss, sometimes laugh about it. We sometimes make fun of it. It's our way of surviving loss. Palestinians have a wicked sense of humor. I'm always amazed when I go there, how much people joke and laugh and are joyful. I'm always so inspired by that. So for me, it was not even a thought. It was just, this is the reality.

RS: Most of the film takes place in the various homes of this family, and in the background you have the violence that's happening. In 1948, they listen to the radio, in 1978 they have a television, in 1988 there is news broadcasts, then in the prologue, there is CNN or Fox. Was all of that archival footage and audio, did you recreate these reports?

CD: We recreated the radio reports from 1948, and from the 1970s all of the television stuff was archival. We did write some of it. Some of the voiceover was written, but it was actually a combination of written and archival.

RS: Was the homeland song footage that Sharif is showing his grandson Noor an actual television special?

CD: We created that. The national anthem used to play, or has played on TV in that way. We wanted to recreate what we had seen with the anthem being broadcast on television that way.

RS: In 2021, you wrote a piece for Filmmaker that was about filmmakers self-censoring. There was a line you wrote I really loved: “Palestine exists in the hearts and minds of millions of Palestinians, regardless of whether or not it’s on the map.” Which I think is something that's often, unfairly, debated. The idea that Palestine lives in your heart is a big theme, not just of this film, but I think it's the theme of all three of your films.

CD: It’s interesting that you bring that up, because as someone who you know grew up in the Diaspora, not able to ever live in Palestine, even if I wanted to, only ever able to visit if I get through after being held and interrogated, I think I did inherit my dad's longing for a place. I think that every Palestinian feels that, in a way. It’s just so much a part of the cultural idea of Palestine. This idea of what once was and this idea of what was lost. Palestine has lived in my heart, certainly, my entire life.

And the longing for a place that I don't even know that I fully feel I'm from, and yet I know I'm from there. It's this interesting feeling. For the longest time, as a kid, I didn't even really know what it meant to be Palestinian, until I was old enough to travel there and was like, “Oh, I see it now. I see, I see what it means.” I have made movies that deal with themes of home and belonging and loss. Now, I think with this film, more than anything, this film is really about what it means to lose your identity in this way, and lose your home, your homeland, and your sense of belonging. How does one kind of move on from that? I think what you're bringing up is really indicative of the fact that Palestine lives in my heart. That's just how I've always felt. I think my movies come from that place.

RS: While Amreeka is about the immigration process from Palestine to the U.S., May in the Summer (2013) is about living in that diaspora you’ve described. There's that scene where they're in Jordan and they can practically see Palestine across the sea, but they can't go there, except for Bill Pullman’s character, which is really twisted. With this film, the action is mostly set in Palestine. Did you see making this film as almost a way of homegoing?

CD: I did. Because it's my first fully foreign language film, and my first film that literally takes place entirely there, it was a homegoing. It was going to be my first time shooting a movie entirely in Palestine. I shot part of Amreeka there. I shot a previous short film [Make a Wish (2006)] there. I've been going there throughout my life, but I was really excited to shoot a whole film there, and not just any film but an epic, large scale film with a very large crew. We were going to be shooting all over the country. I was so excited to spend that time living there and immersing myself in the place and with the people and with the crew. That's why it was so so devastating when we had to evacuate. I had to leave my Palestinian crew behind, and the film was totally thrust into total uncertainty. We had spent three months prepping, and we didn't know if we were going to be able to continue. We had lost a lot of financing because we prepped a movie and had to leave. That was particularly challenging.

RS: Were you able to film at least any of it in Palestine, or was it all shot in Jordan?

CD: Mostly Jordan. We were shooting a half an hour away from the border. We were in the refugee camps in the north of Jordan, and were shooting in the Gaza refugee camp. A lot of the movie was shot there. So it was beautiful in that we were there supporting the community. They were working with us and helping us make the film. That was really beautiful. We did what we could to continue making the movie, making it as authentically as possible, with the community.

Then we did also shoot in Greece and Cyprus, and we had amazing experiences there as well. We found clever ways to shoot in Palestine. So, for example, I really wanted to show Jaffa in 1948 from the sea. So there's this drone shot that flies over the sea at the beginning of the movie, and it moves towards the old city of Jaffa, which has been around forever. Luckily, when I was still there prepping, we chose the exact place from the sea where we were going to shoot, where the city is as preserved as it has ever been. Then we were planning to rebuild it in 3D visual effects. After we evacuated, we hired drone people to go shoot that shot for us. So that entire scene was shot in Palestine. You know, there's no people in it, but there never was going to be.

We sent our visual effects person to Palestine when we were in Jordan, to shoot some visual plates of the clock tower square in Jaffa. Then we shot all of the elements to go into that shot in Jordan. We did a lot of visual effects in order to bring Palestine into the picture and make it a part of the film, because they've never been seen before in cinema. It was important to me to have them seen and be a part of the story. We did end up doing one entire day of a second unit in Palestine where I directed by FaceTime or Zoom. During the whole year that we shot this movie, that was all we were able to manage.

RS: What do you hope the audience will take away from your film?

CD: I hope that what they take away is a feeling of compassion and this sense that our humanity is the most important thing. Our humanity is also resistance, and that upholding it is how we could maybe begin to heal this crazy world. That's really what I want. From the beginning, I wanted to make a movie that could heal, and I really hope that is what people take from it.