‘All That’s Left of You’ Review: Cherien Dabis’ Sprawling Epic Sees the Palestinian Struggle Through the Eyes of a Family
variety.comTomris Laffly In her feature film work, Palestinian-American writer-director-actor Cherien Dabis has been telling intimately specific familial stories since “Amreeka” (2009).
That was the filmmaker’s elegant, modestly scaled and altogether brilliant debut about a Palestinian mother and son, moving from the occupied West Bank to Chicago upon winning a green card lottery.
Dabis wasn’t able to seize the same level of narrative confidence in “May in the Summer” (2013), but certain moments and ideas in her new film, “All That’s Left of You,” remind one of her panache as a storyteller, even if her sprawling epic about a family marked by longstanding generational trauma feels needlessly bloated in the aftermath.
Still, one can’t entirely blame Dabis for being a little indulgent with her latest, which follows a Palestinian family, at first barely surviving, then living under the Israeli occupation through almost eight decades, across three generations.
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