Natalie D.C.
Generational trauma impacts millions of people in the U.S., with children and grandchildren of immigrants often having to face the brunt of their parents’ or grandparents’ unresolved wounds. This concept is explored beautifully in Traces of Home, an autobiographical documentary that follows American filmmaker Colette Ghunim as she explores the complex pasts of her Mexican mother (Iza Ghunim) and Palestinian father (Hosni Ghunim) alongside her older brother (Ramsey Ghunim).
A lovingly crafted ode to home and family, Traces of Home is the feature debut of Ghunim, executive produced by Colombian-American actor John Leguizamo, Mexican-American actress Melissa Barrera, and, most recently, Hungarian-Canadian physician Gabor Maté. The documentary premiered at the 2025 DOC NYC film festival and is slated for a limited theatrical U.S. release from Watermelon Pictures on September 18.
“They crafted our childhood as a fantasy they never had,” Ghunim narrates over heartwarming home videos shot by her wedding videographer father Hosni. Traces of Home takes an impressively engaging mixed-media approach to its filmmaking—from archival videos taken in Ghunim and her brother’s youth to sterile, present-day interviews with the family to simple, yet enchanting animations depicting the often traumatic events from her parents’ own childhoods, now lost to time.
Traces of Home also plays with time in a fascinating non-linear manner. The film begins relatively chronologically as it summarizes Ghunim’s childhood in suburban America, referencing ‘90s sitcoms through its thoughtful splicing together of adorable VHS footage featuring little Colette and Ramsey. After jumping back-and-forth between present-day testimonials with the siblings’ reserved parents and animated reenactments pieced together via sparse family photos and fractured memories, the family sets out on dual adventures—one to Palestine and another to Mexico—in an effort to rediscover Hosni and Iza’s long-lost childhood homes.
Lighthearted moments that succeed in expanding upon each family member’s personality—Colette’s determination, Ramsey’s groundedness, Iza’s cleanliness, and Hosni’s humor—are juxtaposed against darker realities. This contrast becomes especially apparent when the family visits Palestine and is faced with uncertain interrogation at the border by Israeli forces and a frustratingly nonchalant settler who, we eventually learn, has laid claim to one of the homes Hosni’s father built before his family was forcibly expelled during the Nakba.
While Traces of Homes was filmed years before the escalation of the Gaza genocide in late 2023, the devastating impacts of Israel’s colonization still haunt the Ghunim family’s visit, from demolished neighborhoods to closed doors to harrowing photos of local children, severely wounded by Israeli gunfire. These scenes are even more heartbreaking to witness given the context of Palestinians’ present-day plight, a reality many—but unfortunately not all—audiences around the world are only now becoming aware of.
In Mexico, Ghunim’s family face ghosts of a different kind, ones born of alcoholism, abuse, and an escape made even more painful by an unempathetic immigration system. While this journey has a happier end—Iza is reunited with her childhood home—the film concludes on a bittersweet note, as Colette and her mother have a long-overdue heart-to-heart about the lasting consequences of their fraught relationship, a scene sure to leave most daughters in tears.
“I wanted to know my parents, but to do that I had to let them know me.” These are some of the final lines of Ghunim’s narration that spell out her and her family’s path towards healing from unresolved trauma in plain language. While not everyone may relate to having parents displaced by genocide or domestic abuse, most know what it feels like to have parents shrouded in mysteries yet to be uncovered. Traces of Home fervently digs up these mysteries, interrogating the idea of the American dream as it shines a light on perpetrators past and present, from faceless border patrol agents to red-handed politicians to complicit billionaires actively suppressing the truth.
