All That’s Left of You – Interview with Writer / Director Cherien Dabis

Listen here. The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity:

Hello, everyone. I am Shaurya Thapa of Borrowing Tape, and today I'm joined with Palestinian-American filmmaker and actress Cherien Dabis. You would have seen her past films like Amreeka and May in the Summer, but this year, Dabis has written, directed, and acted in All That's Left of You. This is a historical family drama that was Jordan's submission to the Oscars, and it also made it to the Oscar shortlist for Best International Feature. Welcome, Cherien, to the podcast, and congratulations on making it to the Oscars shortlist.

Thank you so much.

In All That's Left of You, we meet this Palestinian family across several generations, right from the Nakba of 1948 to the first Intifada in the 1980s. We see how Israeli occupation displaced families, how young Palestinians joined the rebellion against Israel. So, my first question is, how did this project begin in the first place? What drove you to explore generational trauma over so many decades?

Well, I was really, first of all, inspired by my family, specifically my father, who's Palestinian from the West Bank. He was exiled from Palestine in 1967, and much like the characters in the film, it took him many years to get foreign citizenship just to return to visit his family and the only home he'd ever known. So I grew up with his heartache, with his longing for a place. I grew up watching him become more and more disillusioned, angrier and angrier about the situation back home. I saw his health suffer because of the chronic stress, worry, devastation, and pain. And I really was able to observe the different generations of my family and essentially how our identities formed around this trauma, around this ongoing trauma. And as a Palestinian American who grew up in the diaspora, I was surrounded by people who knew very little about us. I was very keenly aware that they didn't know anything about the Nakba, that I wasn't even really supposed to talk about the Nakba, and it was a bit of a taboo topic to talk about in the United States when I was growing up. I mean, you could say it still is today, maybe perhaps a bit less so, but in certain circles, it certainly is. And so I really wanted to make a movie about the devastating impacts of the Nakba, about what happened in 1948 and really never ended. The Nakba that's depicted in the film is not a historical event. It's an ongoing continuity of trauma. And it's a collective trauma for all Palestinians. So I really wanted to explore that through multiple generations of one family. I felt that the only way to tell a Nakba story was through multiple generations of one family because the Nakba is a collective trauma that's just being passed down and continues until today.

Obviously, recreating Palestine across different generations, different decades can be a massive undertaking. How did you manage to build those various eras, and where did you actually film them, because I believe filming in Palestine wouldn't have been manageable with the situation on ground.

Well, I wrote this movie long before the current events. I started thinking about this film back in 2014. I wrote the script in 2020. So I spent a very long time developing the project, thinking about it, I knew who the characters were, and I knew the entire structure of the film, beginning, middle, and end, before I even sat down to write this to write the script. I had immersed myself in all of these different periods of Palestinian history, I chose the four time periods of the film. And I actually prepped the film in Palestine. I went there in the summer of 2023. And I prepped on the ground for months, we had every intention of shooting the vast majority of the film in Palestine, about 90% of the film was supposed to be shot there with 10% to be shot in Cyprus, in order to take advantage of the tax credits in Cyprus, but also in order to shoot scenes that might be too risky to shoot in Palestine. So we prepped under occupation for many months. But the events of October 2023 stopped us in our tracks. We were based in Ramallah at the time. It became very clear, very quickly, that we weren't going to be able to move around. The situation got to be extremely tense. And cities in the West Bank were being sealed off, and checkpoints were closing. So we realized we weren't going to be able to make the movie, we weren't going to be able to move around the country, and we had been planning to shoot all over the place. So we evacuated, we went to Cyprus, and we shot there first, we shot the 10% that we always planned to shoot there. And I was always hoping to return to Palestine. But we had no way of knowing the situation would just continue to escalate. So eventually, we went to Jordan, and Jordan really came through for us in that they became our creative home, our production partner; we shot more than 50% of the film in Jordan in the Palestinian refugee camps in the north. We were still really able to work with the Palestinian refugee community. I was able to still get my Palestinian cast out of Palestine. I was able to get some of my crew out. So I wanted to make sure that the movie did not lose any authenticity, because we weren't able to shoot in Palestine. And Jordan was a really amazing place for us to shoot because of the Palestinian refugee camps, they're the very large population of Palestinian refugees, and the proximity to Palestine, and the fact that the land is really the same land. So we ultimately ended up shooting in Cyprus, Jordan, and then finally in Greece as well. With also some remote shooting in Palestine, I was able to kind of shoot remotely, by FaceTime with a cinematographer based in Palestine. So we did a couple of days of shooting in Palestine as well.

And that sounds like a bureaucratic hassle, but as you said, I'm glad Jordan and the other countries were manageable to film over there. But even when you were starting to film in Palestine before the events of October 7, a film like this, which is obviously fact-based and it's so emotionally charged, were there any bureaucratic hassles by Israel to film in Palestine at that time?

Well, it's always a logistical nightmare to make a movie under occupation. Absolutely. I mean, we were planning to shoot in many different areas, from the West Bank to Israel proper to area B to area C. We had to get different permissions depending on what area we were in. Sometimes it was the permission of the Palestinian Authority. Other times, it was the permission of the Israeli Army. So sometimes it was the permission of both. You really have to have very skilled line producers who know exactly what to do, who know exactly what permissions to get, and exactly what needs to happen. So, we were obviously stopped at many checkpoints throughout the months of prep that we did in Palestine. We were stopped in the Tel Aviv airport many times with different crew members being interrogated over and over again. There are many things that one needs to figure out in order to make a movie under these circumstances. It's amazing that after all of this incredible hard work that we put in, we ended up having to evacuate and leave all of that work behind and start literally from scratch. I mean, we had to reprep the entire film in Jordan and Greece. Only that 10% in Cyprus was the part that we didn't have to reprep. So it was really a huge undertaking and terribly painful because on top of everything that was just so challenging logistically and financially because, once we fled, we had to start over and we had to raise more money. All of that money that we spent in Palestine was gone. But on top of that, we found ourselves making a movie about what was happening as it was happening. We're making a movie about the Nakba as we're watching a more catastrophic Nakba unfold, a devastating chapter in Palestinian history. And I would say that it was just deeply painful, like emotionally, incredibly painful that art and life were merging, and we were suddenly living this situation. Some days, we were shooting scenes that really looked an awful lot like the scenes that were coming out of Gaza that we were watching come across our news feeds. So, I think that there was just a lot of grief that we were kind of channeling into the movie. The movie became like a container for all of us, and we just threw ourselves into it.

And I can imagine how painful it is to film something in history while a genocide is being live-streamed literally on mobile phones. With that being said, since October 7, international film festivals and awards seem to be giving platforms to more Palestinian cinema. Just in 2025 alone, we had films like Palestine 36, The Voice of Hind Rajab, and your film. You made it to the Oscar shortlist. You had a screening at Sundance. Does it ever feel that, on one hand, we're seeing Palestine in cinema being celebrated in international film festivals and by critics, but yet sometimes it feels like these very platforms are ignoring the ground realities or stripping the politics of the art that's being displayed? So, as a filmmaker, how do you navigate that tension between award season and the urgency of the Palestinian struggle right now?

Oh, well, I think, for me, award season is all about getting eyes on the film. The film is so much our collective story; it is the Palestinian collective story of our collective trauma of the Nakba, and the most important thing to me, at this moment, is getting that film seen. For me, award season is a means to an end. I'm not, as a Palestinian — I don't have delusions of grandeur. Let's just say, I have my priorities very straight. And for me, the reason I became a filmmaker is because I'm Palestinian. And because I understood, having grown up in the US surrounded by news headlines that were constantly dehumanizing us and dangerously maligning and misrepresenting us. I knew I needed to help change the narrative. I knew that from the time I was a teenager, because my family experienced some radical racism in the town I grew up in. So for me, becoming a filmmaker is directly linked to everything that's happening in Palestine, and my desire to represent and tell our authentic stories is directly linked to the need to show who we really are because the world doesn't get to see that, the news doesn't honor our humanity, the news dehumanizes us.

I don't know that I experienced the tension that you're talking about, except that I know that I am working in an industry where the gatekeepers don't want to release our films and have never wanted to take on Palestinian films. Not a single Palestinian film has ever gotten major distribution, and major distributors and streamers are turning down all of our films right now. This is not just about one film; this is about all of our films and our story. And so, it is definitely; there is a lot of tension between being a part of this industry and being Palestinian, and there are some days when I don't want to be a part of the industry anymore. But I feel a sense of purpose that's much larger than myself. And I guess that's what I'm trying to say, that even this movie feels like a movement, like it feels much bigger than me, and I'm here to serve it, and try to use it to create a dialogue with the audience, to try to really shift people's perspectives, to open people's hearts, to immerse them in a perspective that they don't otherwise get to see really anywhere else. That's really my focus. So I try not to pay too much attention to the tension. And I try to really create change, even within this industry. And I do think that this year, the Academy has spoken with three Palestinian films shortlisted, I think it shows that the Academy is very interested in supporting Palestinian voices and Palestinian narratives. So even if the gatekeepers haven't shifted their mandate and are still shutting us out, The Academy is actually quite open, and so that gives me hope. I think that there are places where I can be hopeful, where we can all be hopeful. And that's where I like to place my energy, if you know what I mean, and the tension is there. But I really try to direct my energy towards where I can actually make some kind of a difference.

That makes total sense. Talking about hope, I wanted to get into the film now. A recurring colorful image for me from your film was the oranges of Jaffa in Palestine. It's a recurring motif that just shows how rich the land of lead characters was before it got taken under the occupation. The fruit. The oranges of Jaffa. What does it symbolize for you while you were writing the story?

Well, I mean, I grew up just hearing so much about the oranges of Jaffa. I think it symbolized just the love of the land. The sustenance of the land. The fact that the land is how we survived. The oranges were such a big part of who Palestinians were in pre-1948 Palestine. And really a symbol of pride, a symbol of Palestinian pride, and really a symbol of the relationship between Palestinians and the land. It was like one of the first things that I thought about. I really wanted to feature urban Palestine in the film. We've never seen urban Palestine in 1948. We've just never seen that. If we've seen Palestine at all in that time period, it's maybe more of rural Palestine, or Bedouin life. But to see urban Palestine and to see Jaffa, which was the center of cultural and economic life at that time. I mean, Jaffa is synonymous with oranges at that time. You can't possibly show Jaffa without also showing the Jaffa orange. It was really one and the same; the symbol of the orange is the symbol of Jaffa, which was like the center of who we were culturally, economically, all of it. We Palestinians have many symbols, like the key, and the orange is really one of them. So I wanted that to be a visual motif throughout the film.

And Cherien, my last question to you is, you don't just write and direct this film, but you also act as the matriarch of the family that we see. And I know you have directed yourself in your past films, but what was it about this project that was different or challenging for you, both on camera and off camera?

Well, this was a big project for me to take on as far as it's a very large cast. There are many huge set pieces, like the Intifada and the Nakba scene, with a lot of background. I'm working with children. I'm directing and acting in Arabic, which started out as my first language and became my second language when I was educated in English. There were many challenges that were there to begin with that I didn't previously have in my other films. But thankfully, I'm not in every scene of this film. And now that was very helpful to me, knowing that okay, I'm maybe at 40% of scenes in the film. I think that's why I really wanted to take it on, because I had such a distinct point of view on the character, and I saw her as the spiritual and emotional backbone of the film. And I knew that she was walking a tightrope tonally. And I knew exactly how I wanted her to be played. And I realized that not every actor would have the same perspective on the character. So I realized that I wanted to take it on as a deep dive into the exploration that I began in the making of this film, which is an exploration of my own intergenerational trauma and exploration of my own collective trauma. And so at some point in the casting process and in pre production, when I felt very safe with the crew, when I felt like that I had really chosen the right people to surround myself by and that I could really trust them, I decided to take on the part as a way of the storyteller taking on the storytelling role within the film; it felt like the right choice.

Perfect. Thank you for your time, Cherien. And I like that. That's all the time we had. And I hope you get more and more eyes on this film, as you envisioned.

Inshallah

Fingers crossed for the Oscar season. And thank you so much. It's a privilege talking to you, Cherien. Amreeka is one of my favorite satirical films that I have seen in the past few years. So it's a privilege talking to you, Cherien.

Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate that and thank you for having me.

All That's Left of You is screening in select US theaters starting January 9, 2026.