Schaumburg, Illinois is a nexus of American suburban living. The Chicago suburb is an affluent village that sits 25 miles outside the city proper; its late-capitalist, car-to-mall-to-home pastoral is comfortably idyllic to the point that the town has been reduced to a punchline to Chicagoans. Schaumburg is so traditionally and suffocatingly American that it can make personal identity and heritage an afterthought. That goes double for Colette Ghunim, the director and central subject of Traces of Home. Ghunim is the daughter of immigrants — her father from Palestine, her mother from Mexico — but, in her childhood, her lineage was thoroughly obscured by the American Dream. With Traces of Home, Ghunim seeks to unearth her roots — and the barriers that kept her from truly knowing her parents.
As Ghunim tells it, her childhood was the prototypical ’90s kid experience. She and her brother Ramsey, who also features heavily in Traces of Home, enjoyed lavish Christmas mornings, the occasional family vacation, and a furnished basement in which to perfect Michael Jackson dance routines. Under the hood, though, something was brewing. Ghunim’s mother (Iza) and father (Hosni) entered the United States harboring traumas they wouldn’t think of passing down to their children; a biproduct of that sense of protection meant their respective heritages and homelands went virtually unspoken.
The most Ghunim experienced of her Mexican roots came through other girls’ quinceañeras, and she didn’t learn a word of Arabic, her father’s native language, until she studied abroad in Egypt. Hiding such significant portions of your lives from your children comes with collateral damage. By the time Ghunim hit her teen years, she grew withdrawn and angry, rattling against the walls her mother erected and searching in vain for something to fill the spaces left by her withdrawn father. Traces of Home is, in that respect, an act of undoing: Ghunim sits in close quarters with her parents, often to the point of laughter and tears. When that fails, she takes them abroad: to her mother’s home in Mexico City, to her father’s home in Safed, Palestine, the Ghunims home together for the first time in their lives.
For all the epigenetic trauma she may have inherited, Ghunim’s childhood equipped her well to make a personal documentary. Hosni made a living as a wedding videographer once he reached the States; at home, the cameras were always rolling. Traces of Home comprises years of footage across Ghunim’s and Ramsey’s childhood, from home videos of family dinners and birthdays at McDonald’s to eerie Super 8 reels that fade like forgotten memories. In her youth, says Ghunim, her father’s camera was something of a wall itself, a way to observe his children without participating in their lives and an alternative to her mother’s disciplinarian boundaries. It’s an insight that raises a difficult question: is Ghunim’s documentary an excuse to do the same, to prod at the mysteries of her childhood behind the camera’s protection?
Traces of Home’s scale provides an easy rebuttal. Where one might write a letter to mend a troubled relationship, Ghunim embarks on an international production. The family’s sojourn in Mexico City is both a tragic uncovering of Iza’s history and a joyous reunion. If Iza was severe during Ghunim’s childhood, she beams in front of the camera and around her distant family, settling into a home she was once forced to flee. It’s a testament to the warmth and love Ghunim inherited herself; her curiosity is rewarded by another layer onto an increasingly dynamic and occasionally paradoxical childhood.
It’s in Palestine that Traces of Home fortifies into an act of bravery. Hosni was forced from his home in Safed through the 1948 Nakba (a term that translates to “catastrophe” in Arabic), in which around 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes under Zionist occupation. To acknowledge Palestine as an occupied territory at all in American civic discourse has become a charged political statement; to state plainly the fallout of that occupation is a risk with undue consequence. Ghunim answers the call admirably. She tells In Review Online of the months of coordination necessary to safely visit and film in Palestine, and she’s unflinching in her depiction of the physical and emotional devastation wrought by an ongoing genocide — both to the people of Palestine and her father, Hosni, now a stranger in his own land.
Aside from a handful of craftily animated flashback sequences, Traces of Home is a workmanlike documentary, favoring straightforward, essayistic narration and editing over poetic interpretation. That narrative can occasionally become rigid, hammering points and ideas explicitly where a more nuanced touch may have better let moments bloom. It’s clear that the Ghunim family’s healing is an ongoing event, and the film buckles under the tendency to reach for platitudes and inelegant metaphors (Ramsey’s newfound faith, the ties between walls emotional and physical) instead of settling into a more difficult truth: that it may be impossible to ever truly know someone, that one can spend a whole life mending wounds from childhood.
On camera, Iza and Hosni radiate the sort of charm only distilled by a 50-year marriage. They bicker and joke and prod with hearts in their eyes; Ghunim and Ramsey, for all the difficulties they’d weathered, laugh right along with them. If Traces of Home fails to heal a troubled family, it excels at showing four people quite literally willing to go to the ends of the earth to figure things out. Clumsy writing is forgiven under the massive scale of Ghunim’s endeavor, and her courage is matched in full by a game family. It’s an immigrant story, a picture of a family weary from history and doggedly determined to love each other through it, a document more American than the fluorescent malls of Schaumburg.
DIRECTOR: Colette Ghunim; DISTRIBUTOR: Watermelon Pictures; IN THEATERS: September 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
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