Actor-director Cherien Dabis: "Cinema plays a huge role in shifting perspectives"

Born in Nebraska and raised in small-town Ohio, the Palestinian-American actor and film-maker Cherien Dabis grew up a long way from her familial roots – Palestine on her father’s side and Jordan on her mother’s. But she was always strongly conscious of her mixed cultural identity, a theme that was central to her first two features as a director: 2009’s Amreeka, about a Palestinian family’s emigration to post-9/11 America, and 2013’s semi-autobiographical May in the Summer, about a Palestinian-American writer’s return to her childhood home in Jordan.

Her latest film, All That’s Left of You, is her most expansive to date, and her first not to feature American characters. Instead, it chronicles three generations of a family torn asunder by the Nakba – the mass displacement in 1948 of more than 700,000 Palestinians by Zionist paramilitaries and the Israeli armed forces. The film, which she stars in as well as having written and directed, premiered at Sundance last year and was shortlisted for the best international feature Oscar. A shattering but still hopeful drama, it was produced against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Gaza, which necessitated relocating the shoot to Cyprus and Jordan. Away from film, Dabis is also a prolific television director, and picked up an Emmy nomination for her work on the hit comedy series Only Murders in the Building.

All That’s Left of You tells such a vast story. How long has it taken to develop?

I began actually thinking about it back in 2014. I had always wanted to make a film about the Nakba, and I knew it had to be an epic, multigenerational story, so I needed to be ready for it – you know, emotionally, artistically, all of it. I wanted to show how state-sanctioned violence and occupation impact people, and bleed into the domestic space. So I really sat with these ideas, and immersed myself in research, and developed it for five years before I even started writing. I felt a great deal of responsibility in telling this story. And then I finally started writing it when the world shut down in 2020, and I found myself with long stretches of time. And because I’d let it gestate for so long, it flowed out of me in a way that had never happened before.

Did you draw on your own family history in writing the film?

I took inspiration from my dad and different generations of my own family. Though my father is not a Nakba survivor, he was exiled from Palestine in 1967, and like the characters in the film, had to get foreign citizenship just to return to visit his family and the only home he'd ever known. So I drew on his heartache and his pain over his exile, and how our families’ identities were shaped over time by everything happening in Palestine, and the collective trauma of the Nakba. We went to visit my dad’s family during summers, and I saw him harassed and humiliated at borders and checkpoints, and I felt that experience viscerally. Yet what Palestinians go through every day is so much worse than anything I observed or experienced.

Between films like yours, Palestine 36, The Voice of Hind Rajab and No Other Land, there’s been a surge of work engaging with Palestine’s past and present. How do you see cinema’s role in the struggle? 

So much of the political situation is about who controls the narrative, and the dominant narrative has been the Israeli one. The world has not gotten to see the humanity of the Palestinian people, and I think that what has allowed this moment is the radical dehumanisation of human beings. But when you see what Palestinians have endured, then perhaps you understand why there is such resistance. And from this film, I think that you see that Palestinians resist in all kinds of ways. So I think cinema plays a huge role, more than we even know, in shifting perspectives.

For this film, you founded your own distribution company, Visibility Films. What led to that?

We premiered the film at Sundance last year, and I've never experienced that level of enthusiasm from festival programmers. We had the hottest slot in the largest theatre on a Saturday evening, standing ovations, great reviews, everything you could hope for. And then every major distributor and streamer passed on it. They said they were afraid of the subject matter, that the numbers didn't make sense. I wasn’t surprised. You look at Sony Pictures Classics, Focus, A24, Neon, Netflix – they've never picked up a Palestinian film. I fell into a bit of a depression. And what brought me out of it was realising that I needed to roll up my sleeves and get into the distribution trenches and learn everything I could about distribution so that this never happened again. So I formed Visibility Films and then partnered with Watermelon Pictures to co-distribute the film in North America, and now I’m working on creating an artist-led distribution model. I think that’s the future. 

Tell me about working on Only Murders in the Building – was that a welcome change of pace?

I started directing TV out of necessity – being an independent filmmaker, I needed to kind of fill the coffers. And I started out in network TV, which was not for me at all, and made my way towards the shows that almost brought me back to my indie film roots, like Ramy – even Ozark, where I was kind of given free rein. And then the showrunner for Only Murders in the Building reached out to me with a capsule episode told from the point of view of a deaf character, and I was immediately on board. I mean, I was already on board when they said Steve Martin and Martin Short: I grew up with these guys making me laugh. So those were joyful experiences, and getting to represent a deaf character was also deeply satisfying to me artistically. Not all television is like that.

You’ve acted in all your films to date – is that a challenge for you, or do your acting and directing naturally feed off each other?

It's a challenge that I cherish, let's put it that way. I like to keep myself on my toes, and when I'm stretched, I think I grow so much in that discomfort. But I really like the balance of the two roles: the actor in me balances the control freak in me. That control freak makes a really natural director. But the acting teaches me to let go and just receive the happy accidents – those things that just happen and make a movie really come alive. To just be in control starts to feel boring to me. 

How do you feel living as an artist in America right now?

These are definitely bleak times. Really scary times. But the silver lining for me is that more and more people are kind of waking up to what is happening – and what is happening in the States mirrors so much of what has been happening in Palestine. It took, you know, 10 years to get this film made, and I’m very excited to just keep telling these stories now. TV is fun to do every now and then, but at heart, I'm a film-maker. And I have a lot to say.

All That’s Left of You is in UK and Irish cinemas from 6 February