‘All That's Left of You' Director Says Recognition of Suffering Is One Way to Heal Gaza
Long before the Hamas attacks against Israeli citizens on Oct. 7, 2023, Dabis had started work on 'All That's Left of You,' a film that opens with a Palestinian teen confronting Israeli soldiers and then working back through the events that led to that moment across decades and a generation through the eyes of her mother.
Dabis recounted one of her most haunting memories growing up as the daughter of a West Bank refugee, traveling between there and Jordan and requiring foreign citizenship just to see their family. At the age of eight, her entire family was forced to be strip searched by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint, leading to a tense confrontation between her father and the soldiers.
'I was just convinced they were going to kill him,' she told TheWrap editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman while sitting at TheWrap's Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt. She went on to explain that she wanted to create a story about the Palestinian struggle through the years.
'There were stories from before I was born, from 1948 from 1967, and I always wondered why people didn't know the Palestinian perspective of what happened to us and how that impacted us over generations,' she said. 'I just really wanted to tell that story so that … people could better understand the Palestinian perspective.'
The teen's mother in the film is played by Maria Zreik, who is also Palestinian. In conversation with TheWrap at Sundance, she recounted learning about surviving hardship from her maternal grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor, and her paternal grandparents, who initially fled Palestine during the start of the Nakba in 1948. Today, she still has family that lives in Galilee.
'I think you'd be hard pressed to find a Palestinian who didn't see themselves in this film in some way, because it really is our collective story,' she said. 'But I think also the film really speaks to larger themes of how we can overcome tragedy and personal loss.'
Dabis and Zreik's film comes out at Sundance just a week after a cease-fire agreement came into effect in Gaza, with Hamas beginning to release Israeli hostages. With so many scars lingering from the Oct. 7 attacks and the subsequent bloodshed in Gaza, Dabis hopes that people who see 'All That's Left of You' will see that 'recognition of suffering is one way to heal.'
'There's been so much denial of what happened to Palestinians in 1948 and … I think that that perspective is incredibly damaging and dangerous,' she said. 'There's this passage of this trauma, which the movie shows from one generation to another that I think we need to recognize and look at so that we can then do something about it.'
Watch Dabis and Zreik's full interview in the video above.
The post 'All That's Left of You' Director Says Recognition of Suffering Is One Way to Heal Gaza | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
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