The documentary “Traces of Home” by Colette Ghunim is a tender, fearless debut that unfolds like a mirror held up to memory itself. Blending vérité filmmaking, animation, and archival materials, the documentary traces Ghunim’s deeply personal journey to reconnect her parents with the homes they were forced to leave as children — her mother from Mexico, fleeing domestic violence, and her father from Palestine, displaced from his ancestral land.
This premiere, part of the 2025 U.S. Competition lineup at DOC NYC, screens during the festival’s November 12–30 run at Village East by Angelika, one of New York’s most intimate and storied documentary venues.
Filmed over five years, “Traces of Home” unpacks not only a family’s history of uprooting but also the intergenerational echoes of exile and resilience. Ghunim, who grew up in suburban Schaumburg, Illinois, unearths the quiet survival mechanisms her parents built as they navigated a new life in America. Beneath birthday candles and school photos lies the haunting absence of “the home that was,” a silence her camera gently, courageously breaks.
Through VHS home movies, unguarded interviews, and moments of raw intimacy, Ghunim documents her parents’ hesitant decision to return to the places of their past. Confronting what was taken and what remains, “Traces of Home” becomes more than a documentary — it becomes an act of reconciliation. As their journeys unfold in Palestine and Mexico, Ghunim draws a bridge between two continents and two histories of forced migration, suggesting that the search for home is never singular but shared.
Ghunim began this project in 2016, amid the growing vilification of Arab and Latinx communities under discriminatory U.S. immigration policies. The film’s emotional pulse lies in her willingness to expose her family’s vulnerability — and her own. At one point, she admits through tears, “I have a very strong wall against Mom.” That confession becomes the film’s emotional hinge, illuminating the moment we all eventually face: when we see our parents not as heroes or villains, but as fragile human beings who might be shaped by circumstances beyond their control.
What emerges is something exquisitely human. Beneath layers of inherited pain and rage lie deep roots of love — roots that refuse to be severed. “Traces of Home” offers no tidy resolution; instead, it offers healing in progress. The honesty of that process — the mess and the tenderness of it — is what makes Ghunim’s voice so compelling.
This film is, at its heart, about hope. Not the pristine kind, but the kind that comes covered in life’s dust — hope that mends rather than erases. Watching “Traces of Home,” one feels both the ache and the possibility of going back, of forgiving, of truly seeing where we come from.
It’s a stunning debut for filmmaker Colette Ghunim, a Palestinian-Mexican-American director who brings both urgency and grace to her storytelling. With this first feature-length documentary, she cements herself as a talent to watch — someone with a profound grasp of what it means to belong, to remember, and to heal.
“Traces of Home” (USA, 2025, 89 min.) is directed by Colette Ghunim and produced by Sara Maamouri, Dan Rybicky, and Capella Fahoome, with executive producers Keith Wilson and Dena Takruri. Cinematography is by Hosni Ghunim, Monica Wise, and Rafic Saadeh; edited by Sara Maamouri, Loulwa Khoury, and Laura Moya; the original score is by Omar Fadel.
A co-founder of the Mezcla Media Collective, which supports more than 700 women and non-binary filmmakers of color, Ghunim has long used storytelling as an instrument of representation and healing. Her previous short, “The People’s Girls” (2016), received international recognition for its bold depiction of street harassment in Egypt. A 2023 Obama Foundation USA Leader and 2024 Sundance Institute x ISF Fellow, she continues to embody the belief that film can both bear witness and bridge divides.
Review: “Traces of Home” by Colette Ghunim
World Premiere – U.S. Competition, DOC NYC 2025
Friday, Nov. 14, 7:15 p.m. at Village East by Angelika
In person: Saturday, Nov. 15, 4 p.m. at Village East by Angelika
Online: Saturday, Nov. 15–Sunday, Nov. 30