Sometimes, if everyone lives long enough, children get to know their parents, not as mom and dad but as people who can openly discuss their flaws, foibles, accomplishments, and regrets.

Traces of Home, Colette Ghunim’s latest documentary, mines this territory. The daughter of a Mexican mother and Palestinian father, Ghunim grew up in suburban Schaumburg, Illinois, where she and her brother had every material accoutrement of middle-class life. But something was missing. Both Ghunim and her older brother Ramsey describe their home as tense and off-putting, and recount the high, perhaps impossible, expectations that their parents had for them.

“Mom and dad were always working. Nurturing elements were missing, and I was very angry and sad growing up,” Ramsey confides in the film.

“Everything about my personality was wrong,” Colette says. “I could not be my full self at home.”  She describes her dad as loving but remote and her mom as a strict disciplinarian. “There was fear and then simmering rage, and by my teens I went silent,” she says.

Real communication, they agree, seemed impossible.  

Surprisingly, language was not an issue. Although Arabic and Spanish were occasionally spoken at home, English was dominant. It was only when Colette was in college and able to study abroad that she acquired Arabic and Spanish fluency. 

Still, schooling could not provide answers to Colette’s many questions about her family lineage. Moreover, although she knew that her parents met in the US, their backstories had never been disclosed. In fact, it was only while making Traces of Home that their full histories unfolded. 

Colette learns, for example, that Palestinian Hosni, now a financially successful event videographer, was first displaced when his family fled the village of Safed because of the 1948 Nakba. He was four years old. Time in Lebanon, Syria, and Spain followed. Hosni subsequently came to the US as a film student, married Iza, and started a family. 

Iza’s family came to the US to escape domestic abuse.  At intervals throughout the film, Iza explains that her mom — Colette and Ramsey’s abuela Conchita — left her well-to-do businessman husband because she feared that he would kill her. Travel took the family from Mexico City to California, but their resettlement was far from seamless and Iza recounts spending six months in a Tijuana orphanage while her mom got settled, found a job, and secured housing. 

In retrospect, Iza realized that both her mom and Hosni’s parents had been running away from untenable situations that left them shellshocked..

Traces of Home is a poignant and emotionally resonant exploration of the trauma caused by forced dislocation and of the multiple ways that unspoken pain transfers between generations. When the truth of this emerges, viewers see what may be the family’s first honest discussion. 

Moreover, as the film proceeds, viewers watch as the family leaves the US and travels to Mexico City and Safed to see the places they left behind. Well-shot footage moves between deeply personal and political realities, and we see each person incorporate what they’re seeing into an evolving worldview. For Iza and Hosni, returning to their birthplaces after an absence of more than 50 years is touching and meaningful. Colette and Ramsey are also affected and leave their parents’ homelands with a better understanding of what it means to be a refugee.

Traces of Home is a showcase for reconciliation. At the same time, the film does not sugarcoat the long-term damage of generational trauma or imply that it can be easily undone. There are no happy endings here. But if honest conversations can lead to more loving interactions, the film suggests that healing is possible. And while this process is not formulaic or even linear, viewers will likely be inspired by this family’s example and their dogged work to uncover their foundational history and its meaning.     

Traces of Home, directed by Colette Ghunim, executive producer John Leguizamo, co-produced with Latino Public Broadcasting, 89 minutes.

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