“It’s from Walmart,” a young Collette Ghunim laments, reading the box of a brand-new Barbie on Christmas Day. Off-camera, her mother responds, “No, it’s from Santa. Santa got it from Walmart.” It’s a cute moment that reads as unremarkably American, but in Traces of Home, Ghunim’s award-winning debut feature, it’s a poignant and charged starting point. The documentary follows her parents, one Palestinian, one Mexican, as they return to their motherlands in search of the homes they were forced to flee as children. What begins as an opportunity to reconnect her parents with their ancestry becomes an unraveling of identity, belonging, secrets, and buried trauma. The film peels back the veneer of her “normal” American childhood, replete with Barbies and birthday parties, and excavates the void central to Ghunim’s unshakeable sense of displacement, within her family and herself. We sat down with the documentarian to ask about her process, the wisdom it’s granted her, and the home she’s found on the other side.
Remy Ramirez Both your parents fled their home countries as very young children. You journey with your family back to Palestine and Mexico to search for the actual houses that they lived in as kids. In thinking about what home is, what meaning do these physical structures carry for you?
Collette Ghunim This film was made over the past nine years. And in that timespan, I learned so much about my deeper intentions and why I went on this journey. In the beginning, it was very much focused on the finding of the houses, talking about my own cultural disconnect to home, and trying to figure out why I didn’t have a sense of belonging growing up in the suburbs of Chicago. I just couldn’t figure out what this void was inside of myself. And so, I thought that by going to Mexico and Palestine, and going with my parents to find these houses, that this hole that I was feeling would be filled in my heart.
And while it was so amazing to actually find the houses and have that experience with my parents, I still did not necessarily feel that sense of home in either place. Especially for Palestine, it felt like so much grief because we physically, literally cannot return to live there, even if we wanted to. So, I started going to therapy for the first time, and that’s where I started to learn about intergenerational trauma. I realized that this film was so much deeper in exploring this feeling that I didn’t belong. There were the emotional walls that were in my own house with my parents and the feeling that I didn’t feel home at home.
I think that the physical houses were just a tool for me to start to get to that deeper layer. I needed to have the device of the film and the houses to start to go into the trauma itself.
Remy I’m going to ask about that trauma in a second, but I want to ask also about language. It’s so impressive that you made an effort to learn both Arabic and Spanish—you speak both throughout the film even though your parents also speak English. Why was that important for you?
Collette Knowing our own languages is essential to staying connected to our roots. We can lose an entire identity. After learning Arabic, I feel like now I know my dad, and that I didn’t know my dad before I knew Arabic, which is crazy that I could live with someone for 20 years and not understand him fully!
There’s more!
But it’s for subscribers. Join to read the story in full, and everything else we publish.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Up Next
Hey, Dear Ghapama
