Cherien Dabis Shares Her Family’s Influence Behind Jordan’s Oscar-Nominated Film “All That’s Left Of You”
The title of Cherien Dabis’ Oscar entry, a multi-generational saga that chronicles the displacement of a Palestinian family beginning in 1948, carries an ironic weight.
Due to significant destruction in the original locations, the production was compelled to relocate to Jordan, which is why *All That’s Left of You* is representing the country in its Oscar bid. “It was tremendously painful to have to leave behind five months of incredible hard work,” Dabis remarked. “We had begun construction on our locations, and we had amassed a giant warehouse of beautifully crafted, carefully curated props and set dressing from all of the time periods. We had to leave behind our Palestinian crew, though I tried to bring as many of them with us as I could to the places where we ended up shooting.”
Watch on Deadline
The narrative, according to Dabis, is deeply personal. “I think it all began with just the idea of covering three generations of one family, to show kind of the passage of trauma and to really explore this collective trauma [of 1948] that we Palestinians call the *Nakba*. And that idea really came from me observing my own family. It was inspired by my family, and my father in particular, who’s Palestinian and was exiled in 1967. I grew up feeling his longing for this place where he could no longer live, where he needed permission just to visit. It took him many years to get foreign citizenship just to be able to return to visit his family.”
Dabis further elaborated, “I grew up watching him harassed and humiliated at borders and checkpoints whenever we’d go back to visit. And I also became more and more aware, as I got older, of how much the situation impacted him emotionally, how much it really formed his identity, how he became more and more disillusioned as time went on, how he became angry at the deteriorating situation in his homeland.”
To hear more, check out the panel here.
