A Way Home

When filmmaker Karima Saïdi’s mother Aïcha develops Alzheimer’s at the end of her life, Karima decides to make a film portrait of her at her Brussels care home. Before oblivion descends for good. Aïcha is becoming increasingly confused, and Karima takes her on mental journey back into her past. The filmmaker uses Aïcha’s stories and a wide range of family archive material to create an impression of Aïcha’s life. We start with her youth in Morocco, are shown how her husband brought her from Tangiers to Belgium, and how she later went on to raise her children as a single mother. Aïcha’s answers to her daughter’s many and often repeated questions reveal the extent to which she has struggled with tradition, the position of women, and living between two cultures. And then there is the complex relationship between the two women themselves: Aïcha and her youngest daughter Karima. The daughter sparingly interweaves scenes of her mother as she is now with her personal history, in loving and poetic moments that capture life’s finite and fragile nature. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)