This year, the Academy Awards made history by shortlisting three Palestinian narratives—all helmed by Arab or Arab-American artists—in the best international feature category: The Voice of Hind Rajab from director Kaouther Ben Hania; Palestine 36 from director Annemarie Jacir; and Cherien Dabis’s stirring, decades-spanning family drama All That’s Left of You, in which she also stars. (Of the group, it was The Voice of Hind Rajab that eked out a place in the final lineup, though All That’s Left of You earned a nod at the Independent Spirit Awards.)
With All That’s Left of You now in select US theaters, Vogue spoke to Dabis—who is known for her work on The L Word, Ramy, and Only Murders in the Building—about navigating production at the start of the war in Gaza, drawing inspiration from Palestinian novels and Hollywood epics, and seeing her film drum up Oscar buzz alongside Ben Hania’s and Jacir’s.
Vogue: How did Noor and Malek, the two characters we meet at the outset of the film, first come to you?
Cherien Dabis: I think I started out with the three generations. I knew that it was going to be a multi-generational story about the pathways of trauma and how the ongoing [Israeli] occupation impacts different generations in one family. I started out with a grandfather, a father, and a son, and when I was first thinking about how to start the film, one of the first series of images that came to me was boys just being teenagers, having fun, running around, knowing their neighborhood like the back of their hand, taking shortcuts, jumping over things. I just really wanted it to start with energy and life, knowing where it was going to go. I wanted to feel like you could be following teenagers anywhere in the world. It just happens to be that we find out, once they get swept up in this protest, that they’re in Palestine and it’s the First Intifada.
Can you tell me a little bit about how the war in Gaza affected production on the film?
We had been planning to shoot 90% of the film in Palestine and 10% in Cyprus to take advantage of tax credits and to shoot any of the things that might be too risky to shoot in Palestine. I landed in Palestine in May of 2023 to begin pre-production, and I worked with a giant Palestinian crew on the ground. We found all of our locations; we had a massive, giant warehouse of beautifully crafted, carefully curated props from all of the different time periods; we’d begun construction on our locations; we’d just done everything. We were only two weeks away from shooting when October 7 happened, and, you know, we had to stop in our tracks. Production was based in Ramallah at that point, and things became super-tense really quickly. I had foreign crew who had just arrived in Palestine the week before, and very soon after the events of October 7, they decided that they wanted to leave and go home and they were too scared to be there, which is totally understandable. Their families were worried, and we started evacuating people on October 9th.
It became clear that we weren’t going to be able to shoot, not only because the crew didn’t want to be there, but also because we weren’t going to be able to move around. Villages and cities in the West Bank were being sealed off and checkpoints were closing, and it was just getting to be too dangerous to really move around. We went to Cyprus, and we thought we’d shoot that part of the movie first, and we were always hoping to return to Palestine. But as the situation escalated, we very quickly realized we weren’t going to be able to return, or that we didn’t want to return. We didn’t want to wait to be able to return, because we realized that the movie had just become so much more relevant, and we felt this urgency to get it out into the world as soon as possible.
So we went to Jordan, and we shot more than 50% of the film there, in the Palestinian refugee camps in the north. Then we finished shooting in Greece. So we ended up shooting in Cyprus, Jordan, and Greece, with some remote shooting in Palestine, where I was directing. I think the hardest part of all of that was that we were kind of making a movie about what was happening, and it was happening, so it was just really emotionally intense. Our life and art kind of merged, and it was like we were just living the situation.
Is there a reaction you’ve gotten since the film’s release that’s been most memorable?
Oh my gosh, there’s so many. I’ve been so moved by so many utterly profound reactions. I mean, I’ve had so many people reach out to me to tell me that the stories of their grandparents that they heard growing up came to life on the big screen, or that they never understood what their grandparents or parents must have gone through until they saw the film. I’ve had Nakba survivors from 1948 watch the film and tell me that they were flooded with memories, that the movie was so authentic, that it took them right back to their childhood and reminded them of things they had forgotten about and got them talking about the trauma they went through as children—and their families have never heard these stories before. I had people tell me that the movie broke their heart and then put their heart back together again. I mean, it’s so beautiful.
I’ve had people say they felt healed by the movie, that they felt seen, that they’ve never seen a movie that had really shown them their own trauma before. I’ve had people say that this movie radically shifted their perspective, that they didn’t know a lot of these events, that they didn’t really understand what Palestinians had endured before they watched the film. So it’s been really profound. The responses are really deep and emotional, and feel almost life-changing.
Are there other films about Palestinian identity and Israeli occupation that helped inspire you?
You know, I would say that I was inspired more by literature and by stories that I heard growing up, not as much by films. There was one film, The Time That Remains, that I would say maybe touched on a little bit of what I wanted to do. But I was really inspired more by literature: novels like Mornings in Jenin and On the Hills of God, and also films that aren’t Palestinian—even Hollywood epics.
But I think my biggest inspirations were really the true stories that I heard growing up. That was really what my inspiration was for this film; the true stories that kind of lifted me from the neck, and also just observing the different generations of my own family and how our identities were shaped by what was happening in Palestine.
What’s your biggest hope for the future of Palestinian cinema?
This is such an exciting year for Palestinian cinema, and we’ve been building towards this. Annemarie, Kaouther, and I, our films were all shortlisted [by the Academy], which just was amazing and historic. I’m so honored to have been among my peers in that historic moment. I hope that Palestinian cinema can become more mainstream, and that these films can be seen on a wider scale all over the world. These three films were more successful at the box office than I think people imagine, and certainly than distributors imagine, so that’s really heartening. I hope that that’s just the beginning. I hope that we’re just seeing a small fraction of the success that’s to come for these kinds of films.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
