Traces of Home, the powerful and timely debut feature by director Colette Ghunim, will have its world premiere in the U.S. Competition at the 2025 edition of DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary festival, taking place November 12–30.
Filmed over five years, Traces of Home follows Ghunim on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery as she sets out to reunite her parents with the homes they were forced to leave as children—her mother who fled domestic violence in Mexico and father who was forcefully removed from his ancestral home in Palestine. Blending vérité filmmaking, animation, and archival materials, the documentary is a meditation on memory and an unflinching look at what it means to find our way back home—to ourselves.
Growing up in suburban Schaumburg, Illinois, Ghunim and her brother Ramsey had a quintessential American childhood—birthday parties, family trips, and school plays. Yet underneath the surface of their parents' pursuit of safety and assimilation lay unspoken trauma from their distinct but parallel stories of displacement. As Colette turns her camera inward, Traces of Home unfolds into an emotional excavation of how exile and resilience ripple through generations of immigrant families.
Through grainy VHS home movies, candid interviews, and tender vérité moments, Ghunim captures her parents' hesitant decision to return to the places they left behind decades ago. As the family embarks on dual journeys—set against the backdrop of ongoing erasure in Palestine and the enduring struggles of migration from Mexico—Traces of Home becomes an evocative meditation on how memory functions as both wound and guide.
Ghunim began the project in 2016, in response to the rising vilification of Arab and Latinx communities in the U.S. under discriminatory immigration policies. By interweaving her parents' stories of forced migration with her own search for belonging, she bridges two distinct histories of resistance, reminding audiences that the struggle for dignity and home is shared across borders.
