All That’s Left Of You

When you ask me who you are, tell me about the music you have listened to, the encounters that amazed you, the opportunities you wasted, the rivers you have traced upstream. Then I will know who you are.
— Fabrizio Caramagna

Dabis’s work unfolds its narrative across three Palestinian generations, weaving together past, present, and anticipation. The drama is not episodic: it is the story of how the past never fully dies, but haunts the present, shapes it, and generates everyday sensations that seem to find silence only in shared memory.

The mother (Hanan) speaks to the audience not merely as a narrator but as a bearer of a legacy that is also a cry to remember, to refuse erasure. The family becomes the custodian not only of memories but also of wounds and responsibilities—a structure that sustains identity while simultaneously compressing and exposing it.

“What happens when the past is not yet past?” asks the director herself: the question lies at the heart not only of the plot but also of the film’s conceptual framework. Trauma is not confined to individual experience; it becomes a system of emotional and cultural transmission: uprooting, loss of home, humiliation, struggle.

Here, the figure of the father becomes a crucial knot: the episode of humiliation suffered at the hands of the occupying army, before his son’s eyes, leaves an indelible wound. It is not merely a matter of broken dignity: it is the moment when the father-son relationship cracks, giving shape to the radical nature of the young man’s future choices, as if that act imposed by military power had carved a destiny of rebellion.

Noor, the son, wounded during a protest with a headshot, is left in a state of brain death: his body becomes the field of yet another moral battle. The family must decide on organ donation in Israeli territory. The mother sees in this an act of life, a possible continuity, a way to transform loss into vital resistance; the father, on the other hand, remains torn by doubt: “What if my son’s heart goes to an Israeli soldier, someone holding the weapons that oppress us?” He does not want to know who will receive the organs, while the mother wishes to meet the recipients. In this tension, there is not only a private conflict: it represents a universal dilemma, that between the desire to sustain the flow of life and the impossibility of separating it from the political context surrounding it.

The film, although rooted in historical events—Nakba, Intifada, refugees, occupation—resists easy polarization. It is not propaganda for its own sake, nor does it seek to impose a single truth: rather, it offers a mirror, a perspective—the Palestinian perspective, intimate, corporeal, interior—that makes visible details too often neglected in global narratives.

One could say the film practices a philosophy of the visible: it shows war not only as an external event but as something that runs through the body, language, and relationships. It exposes the difference between political guilt and human responsibility, between victim and survivor. In this way, it dismantles simplifications: “Palestinians are not Hamas” becomes not a slogan but an embodied truth, lived and emerging from concrete reality.

The very title—All That Remains of You—resonates as a question: what remains when everything has been worn down by conflict, generations, trauma? What remains of origins, home, history? How can one belong to oneself when one’s land, language, and memory are objects of offense, of exile?

The son’s body becomes an extreme symbol of this question. Brain death, the absence of return, yet the possibility that new lives may arise from his heart and organs: life intertwined with political paradox. It is the final crossroads, the ultimate testimony: to love still means to give, even when one cannot choose to whom.

Yet, just when all seems lost, the couple decides to return to Jaffa, the place of their origins: a return possible only in the paradoxical guise of tourists, thanks to Canadian citizenship obtained elsewhere. That impossible and belated return, filtered through the condition of being “guests” in their own land, becomes the most bitter of images: the homeland remains unreachable unless disguised as exile.

Something does remain: resilience, compassion, human resignation. There is the choice to witness, to narrate, to testify.

All That Remains of You is an invitation to stay, to remember, to reflect as both community and individuals. It is a political act not of propaganda, but of refusal to remain silent. It is a story of pain, as so many stories are, of faces, bonds, memory.

The echo of what remains lingers because it cannot be let go. It cannot.

I am what I am: partly what I was, not yet what I will be, a fragment of what I wish to be.
— Fabrizio Caramagna