A Poem For My Country is a raw, heart-aching exploration of what it means to belong when the coordinates of "home" have been erased or rewritten. This program moves through the quiet friction of exile, beginning with a father and daughter’s disagreement over a vanishing orange grove in When Light is Displaced, a conversation that transforms a patch of land into a space for multigenerational contemplation. This search for connection continues in Where The Balloon Led Me, where a lonely young man in Kurdistan turns to ChatGPT and the magic of cinema to find a mother lost to death, while in Ruins, the narrative shifts to an experimental search for missing ancestral images through a single photograph of the Algerian landscape. The struggle for survival becomes more intimate and desperate in Carton City, as a family in Germany grapples with the suffocating weight of buried grief and the high price of starting over. This tension peaks in Simo, where a hunger for validation sparks a dangerous digital rivalry between brothers that threatens to shatter their family’s future.

Together, these five films capture the grit and poetry of the immigrant experience—offering a cinematic testimony to the shadows we carry, the legacies we fight to preserve, and the fragile, defiant ways we continue to name our own country amidst the landscape of displacement.

Carton city

Mostafa Ahmadi, Iran 2025, 16', Farsi with English subtitles

Ruines

Emma Lazli Bert, France/Algeria 2025, 22', French & Algerian with English subtitles

Where The Balloon Led Me

Yasmeen Waleed, Iraq 2025, 16', Arabic & Kurdish with English subtitles

When light is displaced

Zaina Bseiso, Palestine 2021, 7', Arabic with English subtitles

Simo

Aziz Zoromba, Egypt/Canada 2023, 24 ', Arabic with English subtitles