All That’s Left of You, by Cherien Dabis, a Palestinian American actress, director, producer, and screenwriter, is Jordan’s Oscar submission. All That’s Left of You arrives not only as a cinematic achievement but as a profound act of remembrance, resistance, and human testimony. To watch it is to step into the texture of memory itself, a film that lingers not just in the mind but in the very bloodstream. It is rare to encounter a work that carries such epic historical weight while also remaining tethered to the smallest, most intimate details of life. Yet this is precisely what this film accomplishes: it expands outward across seven decades of displacement and upheaval, while never losing sight of a single mother’s voice, a single teenager’s choice, or a single family’s fragile attempt to endure. It is at once vast and microscopic, lyrical and brutal, personal and political.
At the center of the story is a Palestinian teenager in the Occupied West Bank of the 1980s, caught in a protest that irrevocably alters his destiny. The event itself is presented not as spectacle but as inevitability, the kind of rupture that countless families in the region have known. From that moment, the narrative unfurls backwards and forwards in time, guided by the voice of his mother, Hanan, who bears witness to the choices and losses that shaped their lives. Her recollections transform the film into a multi-generational chronicle, a saga that spans over seventy years of longing, exile, and survival. What makes the story extraordinary is not its uniqueness but its tragic familiarity. It is a testament to those families whose histories have been defined by displacement and yet who refuse to surrender their dignity.
Hanan herself becomes the film’s moral and emotional spine. She is not framed as a tragic figure to pity, nor as a saintly martyr, but as a complex human being whose very act of remembering is a form of resistance. The director positions her as both mother and historian, embodying the dual burdens of protecting her family and ensuring that their story is not erased. In her, we see a lineage of cinematic mothers—from Anna Magnani in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, whose grief became emblematic of a nation’s suffering, to the mothers in Asghar Farhadi’s films, who carry the invisible weight of fractured households. Yet Hanan is also unique: she is a Middle Eastern woman whose story does not collapse into stereotype but expands into a universal portrait of endurance.
The aesthetic language of the film mirrors this balance between history and intimacy. The cinematography alternates between wide, aching landscapes that suggest the permanence of the land and the impermanence of those who inhabit it, and close, delicate shots that capture the flicker of emotion on a face, the tremor in a hand, the silence of a room heavy with memory. The director avoids melodrama, instead allowing absence, silence, and stillness to become narrative tools. This restraint recalls the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, whose long takes and open-ended silences invited audiences to fill the gaps with their own empathy. It also evokes Theo Angelopoulos, whose sweeping compositions made the Greek experience of exile and historical trauma feel both deeply personal and mythic in scale. Yet while echoes of these masters resonate, the film’s voice remains distinctly its own: rooted in Jordanian soil, carried by Palestinian memory, and articulated in a cinematic grammar that feels both ancient and new.
Performance plays a crucial role in maintaining this authenticity. The actors do not perform in the conventional sense; they inhabit. The teenager at the center embodies the paradox of adolescence lived under occupation: the yearning for freedom colliding with the instinct for survival, the desire for ordinary pleasures overwhelmed by extraordinary circumstances. Hanan’s performance is particularly moving—her weariness, her grief, her quiet strength—all rendered without sentimentality. She becomes the anchor through which the audience experiences the tides of history. Secondary roles are treated with equal care: siblings, neighbors, and passersby all contribute to a collective portrait of a community struggling not just to live but to remain visible.
Internationally, the film has already begun to resonate. One of the most powerful validations came from Javier Bardem, who, struck by the film’s artistry and moral urgency, offered his support. That support evolved into something greater when Bardem, alongside Mark Ruffalo, joined the project as executive producer. Their involvement is significant not only because of their global stature but because of what it represents: the recognition that this is not merely a regional story but a universal one, demanding to be heard across languages and borders. Bardem and Ruffalo’s names help amplify the film, ensuring it reaches audiences who might otherwise never encounter it. But beyond that, their presence confirms what the film itself suggests: that solidarity is possible across continents, that stories of survival in one land resonate in another, and that cinema remains one of the few art forms capable of forging such connections.
In reflecting on All That’s Left of You, one inevitably situates it within the broader history of Middle Eastern cinema. Palestinian filmmakers such as Elia Suleiman and Annemarie Jacir have long grappled with themes of displacement, memory, and belonging. Suleiman’s films, with their deadpan humor and poetic minimalism, depict the absurdities of existence under occupation, while Jacir’s works often highlight the intimate costs of exile. All That’s Left of You shares their thematic concerns but adopts a more epic structure, spanning generations rather than moments, and weaving the personal into the fabric of collective history. Jordanian cinema, too, has steadily gained international recognition with films like Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb, which combined Bedouin tradition with a coming-of-age narrative. Yet this new work feels like a bold leap forward—more ambitious in scope, more unflinching in its engagement with history, and more determined to assert Jordan’s place in world cinema.
The film also invites comparison with Italian neorealism. Just as Rossellini and De Sica turned their cameras on ordinary Italians to capture the aftermath of war, this film turns its gaze toward the ordinary lives shaped by extraordinary political realities. The neorealists believed in cinema as a form of moral witnessing, a way of giving voice to those ignored by official histories. All That’s Left of You operates in a similar register, insisting that the lives of mothers, children, and families under occupation are not peripheral but central to understanding the human condition. The film’s title itself carries this insistence: what remains—what is left—still matters, still demands recognition.
For audiences familiar with Iranian cinema, the film may also evoke the works of Asghar Farhadi, whose narratives often explore how personal conflicts reflect larger social fractures. Like Farhadi, this film thrives on moral ambiguity and emotional complexity. Its characters are never reduced to heroes or villains; they are people making impossible choices in impossible circumstances. Yet unlike Farhadi’s middle-class settings, this film situates itself in the harsher realities of occupation and exile, adding layers of historical and political resonance.
What lingers most, however, is the film’s ethical stance. In a media landscape saturated with images of suffering, there is always the danger of exploitation. This film refuses to exploit. It does not sensationalize violence nor reduce its characters to victims. Instead, it restores dignity by showing people as they are: flawed, resilient, contradictory, human. It insists that dignity is not erased by displacement, that even when much is lost, something essential remains. In this, the film recalls the cinema of Angelopoulos and Kiarostami, but also aligns with the humanism of filmmakers like Satyajit Ray and Ousmane Sembène, who understood that the greatest act of art is to restore humanity to those whom history seeks to erase.
Jordan’s submission of All That’s Left of You to the Academy Awards is therefore more than a procedural choice; it is a cultural declaration. It says: our stories matter, our histories matter, our cinema matters. And indeed, the film vindicates that declaration with every frame. It belongs not just to Jordan or Palestine but to the world, as part of the global conversation about displacement, survival, and the fragile yet indomitable human spirit.
The presence of Bardem and Ruffalo as executive producers further underscores the film’s place within this global conversation. Both are artists who have lent their fame to causes beyond cinema, using their visibility to speak out on issues of justice and human rights. Their decision to stand with this film is both artistic and political. It acknowledges that art is not neutral, that stories like these demand to be seen, and that supporting them is itself a form of activism. Their names will no doubt attract international attention, but more importantly, their commitment affirms the film’s importance beyond the festival circuit.
As I consider the film’s legacy, I find myself returning to its silences. So much of its power lies in what is left unsaid: the pause before a word, the empty space in a home once full, the stillness of a landscape that has witnessed generations come and go. These silences are not absences; they are presences, heavy with meaning. They remind us that memory often resides in what cannot be spoken, and that cinema, at its best, makes room for those unspoken truths.
In this sense, All That’s Left of You is not just a film to be watched but a film to be remembered, carried forward like the memory of a story told by a mother to her child. It is a reminder that history lives not only in textbooks or archives but in the fragile thread of oral testimony, in the whispered recollections passed down across generations. To capture that in cinema is no small achievement; it is an act of preservation, resistance, and love.
For me, this film stands among the most vital cinematic works of our time. It bridges cultures without erasing differences, it honors the past while speaking urgently to the present, and it insists on hope even when hope seems impossible. In doing so, it fulfills cinema’s highest calling: to remind us of our shared humanity.
As the Oscar season approaches, I believe All That’s Left of You deserves recognition not only as Jordan’s proudest cinematic achievement but as one of the most important films of the year. It is unforgettable not because it overwhelms but because it endures, lingering long after the lights come up, asking us to remember what remains, what survives, what cannot be erased.
And in the end, that is all that matters. All that’s left of you—of me, of us—remains enough to carry forward, to resist, and to live.
