In her documentary, Traces of Home, director Colette Ghunim turns the camera inward to uncover the histories her family never fully talked about. What begins as a personal search quickly becomes a journey across the world to uncover her family’s past. Our tale opens with Ghunim at a crossroads with her identity, particularly regarding her family. Raised in suburban Illinois, where her parents, Hosni from Palestine and Iza from Mexico, built a fairly traditional American life, Colette always sensed something bubbling beneath the surface. As documentarians do, rather than go to family counseling, Colette arranges a trip for her parents and her brother Ramsey to visit her parents’ respective homes in their respective countries.
Each trip is fraught with trauma for Hosni and Iza as both are returning to their homeland for the first time as a family. In Palestine, Hosni was forced from his home at four years old during the Israeli occupation. Choosing to fly into Amman as a sort of back door, the family attempts the complicated land crossing required for Palestinians, where Colette is briefly interrogated before they’re allowed through. Once inside, their tour guides share stories of families forced out of their villages and show them footage detailing the conflicts that reshaped the region. Together, they attempt to find Hosni’s childhood home.
The second trip takes them to Mexico, where Colette confronts a different set of family wounds. Iza reconnects with relatives she hasn’t seen in decades—her Uncle Fred and cousins Arturo and Pon. After the pleasantries, we learn the details of why Iza left Mexico. Iza’s mother, Conchita, was regularly and violently abused by her husband, Iza’s father. It got to the point where Conchita had to flee, but escape was problematic. They first fled to Tijuana, but because only Conchita was an American citizen, she couldn’t bring Iza to America without her husband’s permission.
It would be easy to label Traces of Home as a political documentary, and to a small degree, it is. I certainly have my own strong political opinions, but I always recognize that every coin has two sides. Colette Ghunim’s life and family history are interesting to say the least, and tell a story that goes against the current narrative in U.S. History today. It’s important because it’s real.
“Each trip is fraught with trauma for Hosni and Iza as both are returning to their homeland for the first time as a family.”
To say that the trip to Palestine and Mexico was interesting is an understatement. There’s a lot of soul searching in Traces of Home. For Hosni, you feel the emotion of a man coming home to Palestine, not only getting a mixed reaction to his return, but also feeling the weight of his attempts to connect his memories of a four-year-old to the world around him today. For Iza and her mother, Conchita, itit’s about confronting traumatic memories and reconnecting with those who never knew what was happening.
Then there’s Colette and her brother Ramsey’s story. Their parents’ past was not the topic of everyday dinner talk. In fact, their parents’ experiences shaped not only their parenting skills shaped by, for lack of a better term, dysfunction, but also defined the struggles for Colette and Ramsey maturing into adults today. We see that these trips were therapeutic for all by the end.
I can’t help but think that we are all pawns to the select political few who can make drastic decisions and never face the consequences the average citizen faces. When Israel occupied Palestine, sure, they had their motives and reasons, but at the same time, the decisions of a few displaced hundreds of thousands. For Iza’s mother, it was about finding safety for her children, but she ran into a roadblock: U.S. Immigration. My point is, whenever I want to take a hard line on an issue, I can’t draw it too hard.
In Traces of Home, our past has a way of resurfacing no matter how hard we try to bury it. Only by confronting those old wounds can we find a new path to walk together.
For more information, visit the Traces of Home official website.
"…interesting is an understatement."
