The Knife

“Ghassan Kanafani’s novella ‘All That’s Left to You’ (1966) is perhaps one of the most significant Palestinian texts, navigating an abstract symbology of collaboration, violation, and resistance in Gaza. Its adaptation, THE KNIFE, is a largely-unseen and necessarily contingent film. Produced under the auspices of the Syrian General Cinema Organization (GCO), just as Tewfiq Saleh’s THE DUPES (1973), it too changes the end of its originating Kanafani text, in this case flattening it. What results then is a morass of Arab reaction, at once ghostly beach pastoral and nightmarish bedroom narrative, unfinished and elliptical.”