Palestinian voices take centre stage at Sundance Film Festival

Palestinian-American director Cherien Dabis was in the West Bank, days away from shooting her ambitious and deeply personal drama ‘All That’s Left Of You’, when the events of October 7, 2023, forced a radical rethink.

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“We were forced to evacuate… It was really devastating to have to leave our Palestinian crew behind,” recalled Dabis.

“Everyone was so excited to work on this historic Palestinian film that felt like a milestone.”

The film – one of two Palestinian movies premiering at this year’s Sundance festival – follows three generations of a family who were expelled from coastal Jaffa in 1948, and sent to the West Bank.

Costing between $5-8 million, it is a rare example of a major Palestinian-centered feature film getting a high-profile premiere in the West.

“It’s really, really hard to make any film, but it’s particularly hard to make a Palestinian film,” said Dabis.

“It’s hard to raise money for these films… I think people have perhaps been afraid to tell the story.”

Both intimate and epic in scope, the film jumps chronologically, from 1948 through the decades to the near-present day.

Dabis herself stars as a mother forced to confront an impossible decision when her son is wounded in 1988 during the first intifada or uprising.

Many of the stories are based on the real experiences of Dabis and her family.

In one harrowing scene, a father is humiliated at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers in front of his young child, creating a father-son rift that will never heal.

“I saw my dad humiliated at borders and checkpoints,” said Dabis, who visited the West Bank frequently as a child.

“He confronted the soldiers, and they started screaming at him, and I was convinced they were going to kill him.”

‘Blowback’

Though the film centres on a single family and is deeply personal in nature, the divisive nature of its subject matter means ‘All That’s Left Of You’ is certain to provoke criticism.

Dabis says that the film does not set out to be political, but accepts that the impression is unavoidable.

“We can’t tell our stories without having to answer to some political questions,” she told AFP.

“We should be able to share our life experiences and tell our personal and family stories and share our points of view without having to contend with blowback.

“So often we do end up fearing it, even before we have told the story.”

That political reality reared again in October 2023, when the Hamas attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 47,306 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.

Dabis and her team fled, and completed the film by using locations in Jordan, Cyprus and Greece standing in for her ancestral homeland.

“I’m actually still shocked that we finished the film,” Dabis told the premiere audience.

Also Read: Israel blocks thousands of Palestinians from northern Gaza

It does not yet have a theatrical distributor.

‘Dearth of our stories’

Also premiering at Sundance on Sunday is the documentary ‘Coexistence My Ass!’

It follows Jewish peace activist-turned-comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi, as she constructs a one-woman show and grapples with the consequences of Israel’s military campaign.

“As an activist, I reached 20 people, and in a viral video mocking dictators, I reached 20 million people,” she told AFP, admitting she is ‘anxious’ about how the film will be received.

Earlier this week, ‘No Other Land’, a film by a Palestinian-Israeli activist collective about Palestinians displaced by Israeli troops and settlers in the West Bank, earned an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature.

It still does not have a US distributor.

“The industry has to ask itself… there obviously is a need for these films, people want to see these films,” said ‘Coexistence My Ass!’ director Amber Fares.

“I do think that perhaps in the last few years, we have seen a shift,” added Dabis.

“People are understanding that there’s a dearth of our stories.. and that our stories are really missing from the mainstream narrative.”