Closing Night: Traces of Home

From 2024 CAAM Fellow Colette Ghunim comes an extraordinary journey of self-discovery, as she undertakes a quest to reunite her parents with the ancestral homes they were forced to flee as children in Palestine and Mexico. Filmed over five years and featuring evocative animation and archival footage, Traces of Home is a meditation on memory and an unflinching look at what it takes to find our way back home to ourselves. Ghunim’s deeply personal documentary examines her intentionally hyper-American childhood in suburban Illinois and the evolution of her relationship with each of her parents. She reflects on her isolated teenage years during which her connection with her mother, Iza, became strained. Through introspective interviews, Ghunim unpacks the story of why her mother fled to America from Mexico as a child. As Iza explains, “We were running away from something.” It’s a theme that echoes through the film, as Colette’s father, a refugee who escaped from Palestine at just four years old, wishes to return to his family home in his country of origin. Traveling abroad to both Mexico and Palestine, the mixed-race family searches for their original homes, pursuing the physical houses as much as healing from trauma and answers from their childhoods.

This film was supported by CAAM’s Building Bridges Documentary Fund.