All the rest of you wants is more than just sympathy

Sherine Dabis All the rest is yours It is a morality fable in the guise of an epic family drama. Therein lies its astonishing power and, perhaps, its occasional awkwardness. Running 145 minutes, the film opens with a spirited Palestinian teenager, Nour (Mohammad Ahed Elraman), as he runs into a West Bank street protest while playing with a friend sometime in 1988. He joins the rush, and when the shots start ringing out, we see Spoken inside a parked car – right as a bullet goes through the windshield. The boy does not reappear. As we begin to fear the worst, Dabis cuts to a close-up of Nour’s mother, Hanan (played by the director herself) handling the camera, telling us that in order to understand what happened to her son, we must first understand what happened to his grandfather. We don’t get context to who, where, or why she says these words.

Now, the film returns to 1948, and we find ourselves in the life of a wonderful Palestinian family in Jaffa. The well-read father Sharif (played by the great Palestinian actor Adam Bakri) takes to his orange orchards and teaches his young son Salim (Salah Alden May) to appreciate poetry. But the sounds of bombs in the distance and ominous news reports from elsewhere make it clear that her peaceful life is an illusion and that war will soon be her reality. Sending his wife (Maria Zrek) and children to safety, Salem stays behind to help negotiate peace and also to monitor the orchards. Soon, the husk of a man was withering, and he was forced to work backbreaking jobs for the Israelites who had taken Jaffa from the British. Meanwhile, his family finds themselves in a refugee camp.

As the film continues, we see the fate of this family in 1978, 1988, and beyond. For all the narrative sweep, the drama focuses intently on these individuals; There’s not much sense of life beyond their walls. As a result, relationships can feel schematic and unsurprising; Only outside characters stand out to make a point. This may be a function of limited resources and chaotic production. (It was Dabis Preparing to film the film in Palestine when the Israel-Hamas War broke out and forced them to change locations.) But the style of closure also reflects the distorted nature of the characters. As they are consumed by war and displacement, their isolation grows.

And there is power in a transparent temporal landscape: the charismatic Sherif becomes an old, hackneyed man (now played by Mohamed Bakri, Adam’s equally accomplished father), still dreaming of his orange orchards. Salem one day grows up to be a father himself (Saleh Bakri, Adam’s brother—one of the pleasures of the film is the opportunity to watch this Palestinian family caretaker), and in turn he is harassed and taunted by Israeli soldiers. As a young boy, Nour (played by Sanad Alcabarit) grows to resent his father for his perceived weakness in the face of aggression. These historical episodes illustrate the never-ending cycles of humiliation that Palestinians have had to suffer. They have an educational charge: they feel more like tales than stories, and for all their humanity, members of this family can sometimes feel like pawns in a drama rather than fully realized characters.

But again, there’s a purpose behind the seemingly simple quality of Dabis’s approach, and it actually pays off. As promised, the first half of the film, with its grim journey through the decades, turns out to be a prologue to the story of teenage Nour’s fate. (Those concerned about spoiler narratives may want to tread carefully from here on out.) When the film returns to its opening scenes, we learn that Nour has been shot in the head but is still alive, albeit unconscious. Rashid took his parents, Salem and Hanan, to the hospital, but it turned out that the necessary medical technology was only available in Israel. The appalling bureaucracy involved in trying to transfer a sick Palestinian child to an Israeli hospital for an urgent, life-saving operation is another insult – one no less violent or consequential than the abuse the soldiers meted out to the other men in this family. years.

Even so, the film has more surprising moves, as we eventually learn the sad context behind Hanan’s initial address to the camera about Nour and his family history. The irritating nature of those earlier scenes was all building to these later clips, which now force this family into a heartbreaking and unexpected predicament. Finally, Dabis allows us to spend time with these people. In contrast to the history lessons of the film’s first half, the final scenes of All the rest is yours Take the quality home drama you value. Suddenly, these people come to life before our eyes. It’s late, but welcome.

There is a lot of melodramatic potential in this material – especially a late narrative development that has fallen short of many talented artists in the past. (I won’t say what it is, but the title offers a hint.) This might explain why Dabis plays it straight, sometimes stone-faced. Even if the story demanded it, emotional surrender or full-on tragedy would upset what turns out to be an almost chemically precise film structure.

Do you work? There are moments in this picture that may not leave you at first emotionally, as we may think to ourselves, A person in this situation will act differently. But that also seems to be the point. The behavior of the characters is itself a commentary on the numbness felt by people who have been brutalized in a surreal way for a long time. Far from the screaming textures we might expect, this is a family that has learned to repress and contain painful things and bury them deep within themselves. All the rest is yours Don’t really look for sympathy. Instead, in an uneven but artistic way, he shows us the alienation that sometimes requires survival. By the end, it was destroyed.