After nine years in the making and thousands of miles traveled across the globe, Traces of Home, Colette Ghunim’s award-winning film, debuts at the Roxie Theater on Friday.
Traces of Home, Ghunim’s first feature, explores the traumas of forced migration and the intergenerational effects on relationships between parents and children. It premiered at DOC NYC last year, where it won the grand jury prize.
Ghunim, whose father migrated from Palestine and mother from Mexico, decided to make the film in 2017, as the first Trump administration implemented family separation policies and bans on specific categories of immigrants, like refugees or Muslims.
Both of Ghunim’s parents were refugees from their homelands – her father Hosni Ghunim, and his family fled Palestine in 1948, and her mother, Iza Ghunim, fled Mexico as a child with her family, as her mother escaped an abusive partner.
What started as a film intended to tell her parent’s stories as refugees, turned into something bigger, Ghunim said. She slowly began to learn things her parents had never told her before.
“Not knowing that the pain of the forced migrations of my parents had been something that had been passed down … I began to understand that this search for home was actually me trying to figure out this lack of sense of belonging within myself and with my family.”
In the film, Ghunim and her parents travel to both homelands. In 2019, they visited the city of Safed, what is now northern Israel. Her father and his family fled Safed during the Nakba — the word translates to catastrophe in Arab and refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. On that trip, and on camera, her father was able to visit his childhood home, 78 years after his displacement.
“It was really amazing because he [her father] could tell that he was like fully home,” said Ghunim, recalling her father’s behavior interacting with a local Palestinian crew hired to help with the search for his family’s former home.
“He really turned into the full version of himself — like super loud, laughing and [speaking] his own language with his own people. ‘I was like, wow, what a loss it is when we don’t know where we come from.’”
In 2020, right before the pandemic, the family flew to Mexico City, in search of the house where Ghunim’s mom, Iza, grew up.
It was the first time Ghunim’s mother returned to Mexico City after she, her siblings and her mom fled domestic violence in the middle of the night more than 60 years ago, eventually settling in Chicago.
Chicago is where Ghunim’s parents met. Their romance led to both Ghunim, and the questions that inspired this documentary.
“I feel like it was truly a spiritual journey” said Ghunim, “to understand my own self, and my own self-worth and finding home within myself versus trying to find it externally.”
Traces of Home (93 minutes) plays at the Roxie Theater from Oct. 2 to Oct. 5. Filmmaker Colette Ghunim will be present for a Q&A after Friday’s showing, which will be moderated by artist and community organizer, Mama Ganuush . Tickets can be purchased here.
