Writer-director and actor Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You is an epic for the ages that follows a single Palestinian family from their 1948 expulsion from what is now Israel, to living in a West Bank refugee camp in the 1970s, to the Intifada in 1988, all the way to 2022. In doing so, Dabis has given the much-maligned and vilified Palestinians a human face by telling their side of a story that has long been dominated by the Israeli narrative.

Portraying Hanan, the female lead, Dabis convincingly ages over the film’s time span from a woman in her thirties to an elder in the twilight of her life. As the world-weary Hanan takes stock of the years, she reflects the hardships and enduring humanity of her besieged people. As Dabis reveals in this interview, the final scenes of the aging Hanan were filmed just as Gaza was being blown to smithereens.

A child of the diaspora, Dabis was born and raised in America and attended Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her 2009 directorial debut, Amreeka, opened at Sundance and earned the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. The multihyphenate received an Emmy nomination for helming an episode of the Steve Martin–Martin Short comedy on Hulu Only Murders in the Building. Dabis has directed and written other shows for HBO and Showtime and acts in the Netflix series Mo, starring Mohammad Amer.