The Tamesis
This year, the Academy Awards made history by nominating three Palestinian narratives in the Best International Feature Film category, all directed by Arab or Arab-American artists: Voice of India Rajab Director Kaouther Ben Hania; Palestine 36 Director Annemarie Jacier; and Cherien Dabis’s thrilling family drama that spans decades Everything you have left, She also stars in it. (In this group, Voice of India Rajab However, this barely earned a spot in the final lineup everything you have left Recognized by the Independent Spirit Awards. )
and everything you have left Now showing in select theaters in the United States, Fashion Interviewed Dabis – who was famous for her role in L word, Lamyand Only murders in the building— about making it at the start of the Gaza war, drawing inspiration from Palestinian novels and Hollywood epics, and seeing her film win an Oscar alongside those of Ben Haniyeh and Jacir.
Fashion: How did Noor and Malik, two characters we meet at the beginning of the film, meet you?
Cherian Darbys: I think I started with three generations. I knew it was going to be a story that spanned generations, about the path of trauma and how what was happening happened. [Israeli] Careers affect different generations of a family. I started with the grandfather, the father and the son, and when I first thought about how to start the film, one of the first images that came to my mind was of the boys being just teenagers having fun, running around, knowing all about their neighbors, taking shortcuts, jumping over things. I really want it to start with energy and life and know where it’s going. I want you to feel like you can track teenagers anywhere in the world. It just so happened that we found out that they were in Palestine once they got caught up in this protest, the first intifada.
Can you tell me a little bit about how the war in Gaza affected filmmaking?
We originally planned to shoot 90% of the film in Palestine and 10% in Cyprus to take advantage of tax credits and shoot anything that might be too risky to shoot in Palestine. I arrived in Palestine in May 2023 to begin pre-production and worked with a large Palestinian crew on the ground. We found all the locations; we have a huge warehouse full of beautifully crafted, carefully curated props from different time periods; we’ve started construction on our location; we’ve just finished everything. When October 7th happened, we were only two weeks away from shooting, and, you know, we had to stop. Production was based in Ramallah at the time and things got super tense very quickly. My foreign crew had arrived in Palestine just a week before and shortly after the events of October 7 they decided to leave and go home, but they were too scared to go there, which is completely understandable. Their families were worried and we started evacuating people on October 9th.
