Award-winning Palestinian-American filmmaker Cherien Dabis reflects on cinema, identity, and the power of Palestinian storytelling as 'a matter of survival'

It's a hot Sunday evening in Cannes, and I'm cooling off in the Mondrian hotel with Cherien Dabis, the award-winning Palestinian-American filmmaker who is about to have one of the most important years of her life.

"It's amazing to be back here," she tells me, after speaking with our waitress in perfect French. Cherien's diversity of language is certainly matched by her career. She first came to Cannes in 2006 as "a young, bright-eyed filmmaker" invited to take part in a screenwriting lab for Arab filmmakers, where she began developing her first feature, Amreeka.

In 2009, she returned to Cannes with the semi-autobiographical comedy, about a single mother and daughter navigating the culture shock of moving to the US from the West Bank, which screened during Director's Fortnight and won the US Fipresci Prize.

In the 16 years since, Cherien has built an IMDb profile bursting with acclaimed work; from writing, directing and starring in her second feature, May in the Summer, to becoming the first Palestinian filmmaker to be nominated for an Emmy thanks to her directorial prowess on Only Murders in the Building.

She's helmed stand-out episodes for hit series The L Word, Ozark and Ramy, starred in critically-acclaimed series Mo and Fallout and this year,  walked the Palais de La Croisette for the first time as the star of Tarik Saleh's In Competition political thriller Eagles of the Republic.

The third film in his Conspiracy trilogy, the story centres on a renowned Egyptian actor (played by Fares Fares) facing pressure to star in a film commissioned by the government and Cherien plays his wife, an actor "from outside of Egypt, who's come to Egypt and made it," she explains. "She's the voice of integrity in the story."

Cherien's integrity in herself, her work and her Palestinian identity has never been more resonant. In 2022, when we spoke for The New Arab, she described her plans for her third feature, an epic, intergenerational project about a family's survival from the Nakba to today.

All That's Left of You is the powerful result of that three-year effort, a tale that goes back and forth in time as a Palestinian mother recounts the devastating events of terrorism, ethnic cleansing and occupation that led to her teenage son being confronted by Israeli soldiers.

After screening to widespread acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, it's set to be distributed around the world, at a time when a genocide continues to be enacted by the Israeli regime against men, women and children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

"When I started writing this, I had no idea that all of this was going to happen and that the film was going to become that much more critical for the world to see," she explains. "So I was focused on what I can do right now rather than how helpless I feel watching these images and being unable to stop it."

After speaking with Cherien on a female filmmaker panel, put on by the Arab Film & Media Institute, early that day, I was eager to sit down and catch up one-on-one to discuss the last few years and the power of Palestinian storytelling "as a matter of survival."

Tears were shed as we grappled with the dehumanisation of Arabs, the political shift in Hollywood and the vital ability of her work to change hearts, minds and maybe, save lives.

Hanna Flint for The New Arab: What does it feel like to be back here nearly 20 years later?

Cherien Dabis: It's amazing to be back here, especially since I just made my third feature. It was at Sundance, and it sold all over the world. We went to EFM (European Film Market), and now we're here continuing the sales. I'm meeting with some of the distributors that I'm working with in different parts of the world, and it's exciting hearing about their plans for the film and when it's going to be released. It's been fun to do panels and just talk about the film. I've never done the whole Palais red carpet with a film that I'm in, so that's fun.

Yes, you're here with Tarik Saleh's Eagle of the Republic as an actor. What was it about the project that spoke to you?

It was such an amazing experience. I loved The Nile Hilton Incident and Cairo Conspiracy, so I responded right away. It's just an intriguing thriller, but it has humour, it's poignant, it's edgy. The character that he was thinking of me for was my favourite in the script. She's an Egyptian movie star, from outside of Egypt, who's come to Egypt and made it. She's the co-star of George, who's played by Fares Fares, and he's pulled into this world of corruption. She's the voice of integrity in the story, and you see what happens to people who have integrity in this world.

We often see Hollywood films about Hollywood. How was it playing a movie star in Egyptian Cinema?

It was so fun because I grew up watching Egyptian films. My parents immigrated to the US with a massive collection of VHS tapes of every Egyptian movie. That was the thing that was on every night in our house, some Egyptian drama or musical. My older sister's name is Faten, and she's named after Faten Hamama. So I had this sense of nostalgia for Egypt, the Hollywood of the Middle East, and was enamoured with the world of movies. When I went to film school, one of my favourite classes that I took was about Arab and North African cinema. We watched so many amazing Egyptian films from the 40s, 50s and 60s, and they were so good, but were taboo back then. They talked about important things that sometimes you don't even see today in the mainstream.

As a writer-director yourself, how was it collaborating with Tarik?

I appreciate getting to act and turn off as a director, meaning the person who's in control and who knows everything. It's fun for me to sit back and trust a director and because I know what that's like to direct and to really want the actor's trust. Tarik is an auteur. The first Zoom that we had, I shared my thoughts, and he's super open, so it was fun to have such a trusting relationship. But a big part of preparing for the part was learning the Egyptian accent, and that was definitely challenging. Arabic is my second language, and I speak with the Palestinian dialect, so I had a dialect coach because so many of us come from outside of Egypt.

That's so important because I think about the critique of the different accents in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which might not be discernible to Western audiences. It's beautiful when filmmakers and actors make the effort to make dialogue authentic and specific to a region where it's set for native speakers.

Yeah. I also had a Palestinian dialect coach on All That's Left of You because there are so many different dialects in Palestine. We all had to try to speak the same dialect, so we sounded like family. But even within one family, there can be different dialects. The grandfather is from Yaffa, and that character is played by Mohammed Bakri, so he had to speak with a more Yaffawiah accent. After they're displaced in 1948, they end up near Nablus, so the rest of the family has more of a Nablusi accent. I play the wife of the main character, and I come from Jerusalem, so we found ways to just make it very specific, so we understand where people come from.

When we spoke a few years ago, you were telling me about your plans to make a Nakba film, and now it's here. What does it feel like to be sharing it with the world at a particularly resonant time for Palestine?

It's more personal than ever, and it's more important than ever that the film gets out there sooner rather than later. It was an incredible journey. Parts of it were easy, and parts of it were some of the most challenging experiences of my life. Funnily enough, the financing came together very quickly. It was amazing. We got a lot of public funding out of Europe, out of Germany, from partners who really believed in the story. Arte Germany came on board, and we got funding from the Middle East. In the Arab world, the Doha Film Institute and the Red Sea Film Foundation. In May 2023, we went off to Palestine and we prepped on the ground, working with the local crew, and it was amazing to be there.

What was that experience like?

I spent almost five months on the ground working with the local crew, and then some of my German heads of department came. They were with me for three months before my entire foreign crew came, mostly from Germany, on October 2nd or 3rd. We did our entire tech recce, you know, where you take all of the crew to all of the film locations: Ramallah, Jericho, Nablus, Haifa and Yaffa. We were all over the country, walking through all of our shooting plans and then, literally, the next day after we finished this tech recce, we woke up to the news. It was just a shock, and then before we knew it, we ended up having to evacuate.

Wow.

People were torn. They wanted to stay, and they wanted to go, but we had to flee, and it was just devastating to leave behind our Palestinian crew, people who were so excited to finally work on a big, historic Palestinian film like this. We had done so much beautiful work; we had started constructing our locations, we had amassed a giant warehouse of beautifully curated props and set dressing, things never before seen in cinema. There was so much uncertainty. We had no idea what was happening, where to go, or what to do. Finally, we went to Cyprus and had to raise more money.

Did anyone want to pull out or not do it after October 7? Germany's government has not been great towards Palestinians since.

Everyone remained steadfast and supportive. They believed in the project, and in some ways, it was going to become an even more important project. I'm looking to share a Palestinian experience that the world hasn't seen. And I'm making a movie that's ultimately about one family surviving decades of political upheaval and personal loss. How do you survive that? The film shows a humanity that's already there, a humanity that we don't get to see often enough. It's coming from my heart.

So what were the next steps?

We lost all of the work that we had done in Palestine and had to start over. I found myself looking for Palestine everywhere but Palestine. It was intense. We ended up shooting in Cyprus, Jordan and Greece, but one of the toughest things about the whole thing was that we found ourselves shooting a movie about what was happening as it was happening. So it was incredibly emotionally intense. Evacuating Palestine bonded us, the cast and crew, and we poured ourselves into the film. The film became this container for our grief, for our compassion, for all of that mixed emotion that we were feeling and wanting to share.

As a Palestinian filmmaker, how do you cope with making a film when devastation against the Palestinian people is brutal and ongoing?

We did talk about that on set. The cast and I would be watching our news feeds and seeing the most horrific images that kill you to watch every single day. For me, it was a matter of throwing myself into the movie and knowing that we're doing something that hasn't been done and that will hopefully help to shift people's perspectives so that this never happens again. Arabs, Muslims, and especially Palestinians, have been so dehumanised by Western media. Hollywood has been dehumanising us for nearly a century, and what we're seeing is a direct result of that, of that endless dehumanisation.

Storytelling is so important, it's a matter of survival for us. That's where I'm coming from as a filmmaker, as a storyteller. When I started writing this, I had no idea that all of this was going to happen and that the film was going to become that much more critical for the world to see. So I was focused on what I can do right now rather than how helpless I feel watching these images and being unable to stop it.

Tell me about the casting members of the Bakri filmmaking family.

It was a dream. I had always wanted to work with the whole family. The film is an intergenerational portrait on screen and off screen. Saleh and Adam Bakri, their mom is from Yaffa, Salah was born in Yaffa, and he was raised there until he was five years old, and that's exactly the experience of the main character of my film. The film opens in 1948, and you see a kid at six years old suddenly having to flee his home, and little does he know that he's never going to get to return. Saleh was so connected to that character and that story because of his own experience.

Cinema is like a history book, and so much of Palestinian cinema is about committing these stories to the screen and engaging people in ways the news might not. How was navigating the shift in cinematic storytelling because All That's Left of You is very different to your previous films, Amreeka and May in The Summer?

It really is. One of the most fulfilling parts of the film for so many of us who worked on it was creating Palestine in 1948. Early on in the film, we cut to 1948 and start telling the whole story of what happened to the family. But we've never seen urban Palestine in 1948, but it opens in Yaffa and we see a gorgeous Yaffawiah home, how it's furnished, an upper middle class family, and the orange groves that they have, the prosperity, the education and the reciting of poetry, and you feel what was lost. That's what the world doesn't know.

There's this whole myth that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land, yet we were there. So, to recreate what we had that was lost was joyful. It was joyful to immerse ourselves in what we had. To find those vintage pieces, I mean, we searched all over Palestine, and whatever we were able to get out of Palestine, we shipped to the different locations. Some of it we had to find all over again, but it was beautiful.

What would it mean to have your film shown in Palestine? Are you hopeful that it might happen?

Absolutely. I look forward to showing it in Palestine and sharing it with audiences there and audiences outside of Palestine. To the generation that survived the Nakba. Because one of the things I wanted was for that generation, who're not going to be with us that much longer, and most of them are not ever going to be able to return to Palestine. I want them to experience Palestine in this film.

That's making me cry because it's been 77 years now.

You're going to make me cry, too.

It's just beautiful to hear. I'm not Palestinian, but I'm Arab, and I've seen the attacks, the dehumanisation, and it's just devastating. This is why I think it's so important what you're doing.

One of my executive producers is the daughter of a Nakba survivor, and her father's from Yaffa. He had to flee Yaffa when he was young. He watched the film and we captured what we could, but he wept. The film reminded him of things he had forgotten from his childhood living there, and it moved me. I want the movie to be a healing experience for so many people within the Palestinian community, but also outside.

It's getting away from the gaslighting of Palestinian life, history and the brutal occupation.  I remember you saying to me a few years ago that even saying you're Palestinian is politicised. Do you feel like there's a shift in Hollywood?

We're obviously paying a really heavy price, but people are waking up to the reality of what is happening right now. I don't know yet if the shift is big and meaningful enough for there to be more films like this, because I think that there's still a lot of fear, and not enough people are speaking up. Even if they're doing what they can, we're not seeing institutions speak out, we're not seeing this happen on a large enough scale. I'm grateful for the shift that we are seeing, and it's significant. Mostly, I'm seeing it more in the waves of humanity and the people in the streets protesting. There's a lot of propaganda that we still have to combat and decades of brainwashing.

It feels like a miracle that this film exists.

I really had to fight to keep going, but an army of people came together to support me. But look, I approached this story in a universal way, and I made the movie in a way that people have called it a mainstream epic of human survival. It's a testament to the resilience and patience of a people who have been under occupation for decades, and that's putting it lightly.

[Cover photo: Photography by Randall Michelson] 

Hanna Flint is a British-Tunisian critic, broadcaster and author of Strong Female Character: What Movies Teach Us. Her reviews, interviews and features have appeared in GQ, the Guardian, Elle, Town & Country, Mashable, Radio Times, MTV, Time Out, The New Arab, Empire, BBC Culture and elsewhere

Follow her on Instagram: @hannainesflint