In the trailer for All That’s Left of You, there is a brief image of orange trees and heavy machinery. For many, it may pass unnoticed. For me, it opened a wound that has never fully closed.
My great-grandfather Ahmad Sulieman Qutiefan owned an orange grove in Beit Nabala (Bayt Nabala), a Palestinian village just nine miles from Yaffa. Those oranges were not inherited wealth. He planted them himself, beginning as a child, after his own father passed away. Knowing his family depended on him, he stepped into responsibility early, planting tree after tree, tending the land with care and pride. The grove became his life’s work. He nurtured it daily, believing it would one day sustain his children and his children’s children.
He never imagined that it could simply be taken.
In 1942, during the British Mandate, his orange grove was bulldozed. His children were still young. He died of a heart attack the next day. What was destroyed was not just land, but a future he had carefully grown with his own hands.
Years later, on July 13, 1948, the people of Beit Nabala fled. News had reached the village of massacres in neighboring towns including both Deir Tarif and Lydd. Families left not because they wanted to, but because survival demanded it. The village was emptied. Homes were left behind. My great-grandfather’s grave remains there still surrounded by silence, in a village with no people left to visit it.
From that moment on, diaspora touched every member of his family. The separation from land, from home, from certainty became a shared inheritance, passed quietly through generations.
All That’s Left of You, written, directed, and starring Cherien Dabis, tells the story of a Palestinian family beginning in Yaffa and stretching across 75 years of displacement and upheaval. Even without having seen the full film yet, the trailer alone reflects a truth I know intimately: that what was lost was not accidental, and that its impact did not end with the first generation forced to leave.
Orange groves were never just agriculture. They were proof of belonging. They were “care” made visible. They were daily labor tied to dignity and continuity. When they were destroyed, it was an attempt to sever a people from their past and from their future at once.
Generations later, I am still watching these same patterns unfold: land taken, homes erased, lives uprooted. The story this film gestures toward is not confined to history. It is ongoing.
If you are in Columbus, I encourage you to watch All That’s Left of You at Gateway Film Center. Go to witness a story rooted in places like Yaffa and Beit Nabala and carried forward by families who continue to remember, even when the world insists they forget.
Some stories are planted carefully over generations.
And some are destroyed overnight.
