Synopsis
Shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, Danae’s Jewish parents, renowned author Amos Elon and former literary agent Beth Elon, hired Musa Obeidallah, a Palestinian father of eleven, to look after their only six-month-old daughter on a daily basis. He would remain there for 20 years, until Danae left to study in the United States. After losing touch with each other, not least because of growing political tensions in Israel, Danae decides to revisit her past and find the man who played such a pivotal role in her life.
Exploring the delicate boundaries between family, social class and politics, Danae Elon illuminates not only the troubled political heritage shared by these two families, but also the hope for the future in her quest for “another road home”.
A word from Tënk
In Another Road Home, we find what characterizes Danae Elon's entire documentary work: a thirst for answers in the face of issues that are as loaded as they are irresolvable, and an impressive tenacity in the face of the pitfalls and rebuffs that such an approach entails. To allow herself to embark on a quest that might seem hopeless, Elon chooses to commit herself by putting herself at risk.
In this deeply moving work, which is particularly resonant with current events and the new conflagration in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the filmmaker invites her own family to face up to its contradictions. Determined to find Musa, the man who acted as her father until she was 20, she involves her own parents, and the many children of her former guardian, now living in the United States, far from their father. The discomfort of the situation is palpable for everyone involved. Class differences, feelings of injustice, unconscious reproductions of biases, state violence… the families reunited after years of silence carry with them a lot of unsaid things, which seem to make sincere friendship impossible, despite everyone's good will.
Danae Elon relentlessly probes each of them, seeking to understand both the content of the relationship that bound her as a child to a man who marked her forever - educated, she says, and immediately taken over by her father - and to shed light on everything that hindered the expression of sincere feelings, prevented by a system of oppression and the existence of power relationships.
If, in order to live together, they have to deny the political context and the injustices surrounding it, then this shared life seems to be no more than a fiction. Danae's film, for all its tenderness, is a sad reminder that as long as power relations exist between individuals, as long as systems enslave groups, nurture racism, organize and hierarchize differences, human relationships will inevitably be tainted by them. Except perhaps for rare relationships like that of Musa and Danae, where an unconditional love emerges, despite the risks and injustices, as a precious and vital reminder of our human.
Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director
