The Brooklyn Rail

Inside the frame of a camera, a close shot follows a hand carving a black-and-white image of people from a page of a history book. This action of removing figures from their background could symbolize freedom of movement or forced displacement. But when those discrete cutouts appear as paper doll motifs floating through the new documentary Everything You Have Is Yours, the overwhelming feelings of disconnect and desire they conjure is undeniable.

The film, directed by Tatyana Tenenbaum and produced by Brighid Greene, will have its US premiere on November 15 at Village East Cinema as an official selection in this year’s DOC NYC film festival. Everything You Have Is Yours is inspired by the story of Israeli-American choreographer Hadar Ahuvia and the title draws from a dance of hers that premiered at the 14th Street Y in 2018. Tenenbaum first approached Ahuvia in 2017 about filming a short artist profile. But over time, the project grew into a more ambitious documentary as Ahuvia’s backstory and the tensions in her work surrounding historical oppression unfolded on camera. Behind the lens, an affinity developed between both women as Jewish artists of Ashkenazi descent.

The main narrative thread follows Ahuvia’s creative process as she reckons with the origins of Israeli folk dances. When we first meet Ahuvia, she is performing a dizzying solo in a small, informal space. As her body whips in circles, eyes downcast, hair flying, we hear a voiceover asking a series of suppositional questions. Moving through a list of hypotheticals, of atrocities that could have been un-perpetrated against the Jewish people, and between Israelis and Palestinians, she asks: “Maybe I was never complicit in any trail of tears?”

It is quickly apparent that these guiding questions are as personal as they are political. (And yes, they are uncanny in their application to US history too.) Ahuvia’s feelings of complicity are palpable. The camera follows Ahuvia in rehearsal, backstage, onstage, at home, and abroad as she choreographs a new work about the codification of the first Israeli folk dances.

Onstage they are described as “new dances for the new state,” and between Ahuvia’s research and some background from cultural studies scholar Shirly Bahar, we learn that Israel’s folk dance project, begun in the 1930s, was pivotal in helping to construct a sense of Israeli identity that could pre-date the state and contributed to a process known as de-Arabization. Ahuvia traces the hora back to its roots in the Balkans, arms linked with her fellow dancers as part of her performative lecture-demonstration. She also follows the well-documented history of Israeli folk dancers borrowing steps learned from research trips they made into Palestinian villages. There they learned dabke (sometimes dabka), a Levantine line dance common to many different Arab cultures.

“You have to feel it in your body, and what better way to do this than dance?” Bahar says, describing the new nationalism. Her words set up a scene of collaborator Mor Mendel and Ahuvia deconstructing the components of Israeli debka.

Raised in a family where she learned these dances as a child in her mother’s troupe and absorbed an expectation to follow in her mother’s footsteps, Ahuvia’s growing political awareness sets up heavy stakes, making her a sympathetic character you want to root for. In the context of Israel’s violent occupation of Palestine, the borrowing of dabke steps by the Israeli folk dance movement, which might otherwise stem from a natural cross-pollination between cultures that have shared a region for millennia, begins to look more like appropriation. It may only be art, but it feels like Ahuvia—and in turn Tenenbaum behind the camera—is risking a lot in trying to reconcile the history she was given with the truth she is seeking. The probability of estrangement with her mother, of misunderstandings with her artistic collaborators, and causing offense to her community and audience looms large as she attempts to revise the record.

It has been over a year since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking more than two hundred hostage. The war Israel has waged in response has come at an unfathomable cost: claiming the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians, not including the bodies that remain unaccounted for under the rubble of Gaza’s immense destruction, and more recently, spilling out into Lebanon as the threat of a wider war looms. And the firings, resignations, deep divisions, and protests that have unfolded in the art world and on campuses in response to all of this are a reminder of the real social and economic consequences that still accompany attempts to challenge the dominant narratives and power structures that accompany the region.

Though Ahuvia is clearly both the main character and inspiration for the film, Tenenbaum doesn’t over-privilege her point of view. A portrait of the Freedom Dabka Group sets up a counter-narrative, showing dabke dance at the heart of a Palestinian community gathering in New York City, and the perspective of Ze’eva Cohen, a dancer and choreographer of Yemenite heritage, whose story illuminates ethnic divisions and discrimination among Jewish people. Interviews with Ahuvia’s collaborators Gil Sperling, Mor Mendel, and lily bo shapiro push back against any misconception of a monolithic Jewish identity. In tandem, other stories emerge on screen. There is the chasm that forms between Ahuvia and her fervently Zionist mother, over Ahuvia’s loyalties and the focus of her look into Israeli folk dance, and the interviews that parse the complex and differing relationships Ahuvia and her artistic collaborators have with the state of Israel and their own Jewish identities.

In a poignant sequence, the audio of an interview with Mendel—who is Israeli and expresses regret when mentioning her compulsory military service—carries on as the visuals transition to a rehearsal with Ahuvia. Heads connected, their feet mark a somber rhythm as Mendel reflects on genocide and trauma: “I do know there was a sense of building a home… and desire to do it at any cost.”

Their winding steps continue as Mendel uses one hand to cover Ahuvia’s eyes and the other to clasp her hand behind her back. Ahuvia adds her own hand to her face as Mendel’s head tips forward in a haunting image of blindness.

In between many other poignant dance scenes and candid interviews, Tenenbaum’s tactile filmmaking returns often to layer the paper figures in unexpected ways and project video across an array of surfaces. In this way, she chips away at the authority of recorded history. Everyday objects that might otherwise double as family heirlooms become vessels for more, spaces filled with contradiction: an early Israeli folk dance troupe, the Karmon Dancers, plays across a chipped teacup; fictional kibbutz footage rolls over an open book telling the pioneer story of Beit HaShita, the kibbutz where Ahuvia’s grandfather was a founding member; a viral video of Palestinians dancing at the Gaza border in a 2018 protest lights up a terracotta planter in a dim room. In an inventive sequence of short cuts, those same dancer-protesters are extracted from a printed page moments after we see them on the planter, only to be duplicated and animated in an abstract stop motion. All of which sets up a jump to a Palestinian protest in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where Tenenbaum circles back to Ahuvia, a bandana masking her mouth, chanting “Free, Free Palestine!”

But nowhere is the interplay between past and present more dynamic than in the scenes with the Freedom Dabka Group. Tenenbaum uses footage of the dancers and musicians in rehearsal, with guests at a wedding, with young students in their studio on Staten Island, and at an outdoor performance to show a living connection between Palestinian people and a dance pivotal to their culture. The uptempo music and undeniable joy of their dabke practice is not only welcome for its vibrancy and participation; it is also a physical rebuttal to the tale Ahuvia is unraveling from Israeli folk dance sources.

Their charismatic leader, Amer Abdelrasoul, notes that the group began without any political or religious agenda, but over time they have realized its role in forming a Palestinian identity in the diaspora. Not one to mince words, when confronted with Israeli debka, Amer says, “You can’t respect someone and steal their culture.”

Which circles back to the title question, drawn from an experience Ahuvia had with the Israeli Embassy security, in reference to all that was on her person: “Everything you have is yours?” The ambiguous wording allowed Ahuvia to extend that inquiry conceptually to a birthright and the authenticity of the folk dance culture that was passed down to her.

But can these Israeli folk dances belong to Ahuvia if they never fully belonged to her forebears? Is everything she has still hers?

By the end of the film, Tenenbaum’s treatment of the title in the opening credits was top of mind. For a few seconds, those five words, EVERYTHING YOU HAVE IS YOURS, are seen as statement, before a question mark punctuates them. The effect of the imperative hits differently as the entitlement exposed in the film gives way to a fresh accountability.

What would it mean to honestly own what we are given? Would we feel more urgency in learning a fuller history, refuting lies, or giving back what has been stolen? Would we be able to see the violence in the dehumanizing process of co-opting or denying another culture and feel compelled to stop it? Would it look like a brief glimpse of Ahuvia, smiling, in the dancing crowd at a Freedom Dabka Group performance?

In Everything You Have is Yours, Ahuvia, Tenenbaum, and the entire cast push us forward with their embodiment of these questions, their willingness to be vulnerable amid polarizing debate and deadly conflict. Ninety minutes later, you might realize you have been led to a place from which you can’t go back.