Where, is ‘Home’?

Movie Review: ‘Go Home’

The writer and director of the critically acclaimed movie ‘Go Home’, Jihane Chouaib was born in Beirut (Lebanon). Just before the civil war. In 1976 her family chose exile and Jihane spent her childhood in Mexico, and her teenage, in France where she studied philosophy and theatre.

Iranian theatre artiste, Golshifteh Farahani plays a French-Lebanese ballerina who moves into a dilapidated and abandoned ancestral mansion, bent on solving a family mystery. There is a darkness in the movie, literal and metaphorical The desire to belong to the place one was born in, against the practical, intelligent urgency, to sell, move out and make a break with the past, are themes highlighted here.

Through the entire movie lasting 90 minutes, you get the feeling of the universality of human emotions, that borders and passports cannot compartmentalise.

Brilliant acting, great lighting, and excellent cinematography make this a movie I loved.

There is a poem written by the wordsmith, Sahir Ludhianvi, called ‘O Gentlemen’, which sounds better in the original Urdu, about humanity bleeding when countries go to war. And there is another poem by James Kirkup, that says, ‘No Men Are Strange, No Countries Foreign.’ The first one, I taught to students, in a college classroom, the second, was taught to me, in school.

The poems encapsulate the feeling one comes away with after watching, ‘Go Home’

The movie is even more significant in the wave of racism and nationalism that is sweeping individual pockets in the world nowadays.

Can’t we see this for ourselves?

We can’t go home.

There is no home to go to.

This is our home: just like it is the home of whoever has come in here.

And if we order everyone home, we must go, ourselves.

Do we have a place to call home?

‘Go Home’ is a small movie, with a significant message. We need to live together, and learn to adjust to each other’s eccentricities…like we do in our own houses in these difficult times when we are forced to spend time together.

Our homes are where our hearts and our lives are.

We have no other.

No one does.

There is no hope for humanity, until we learn to live by this eternal tenet.

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