Reema, There and Back
2006 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Paul Émile d'Entremont
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Sixteen-year-old Reema leaves Nova Scotia to spend two months in Jordan with her Iraqi father, after living mainly with her Canadian mother. Returning home, she reckons with a split cultural inheritance that brings both strain and richness to her sense of self.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Look, a coming-of-age doc about cultural identity sounds like the kind of earnest thing that puts me to sleep—except d'Entremont refuses the expected catharsis, letting Reema's split inheritance remain genuinely unresolved, which is braver than the usual immigrant-daughter redemption arc.
This film sits in a distinguished lineage of intimate, intergenerational portraiture—the formal restraint of the handheld footage and the precision of the edit create space for the complexity of belonging itself to become the subject, which is exactly what documentary craft should do.
The film's entire architecture hinges on one choice: to let silence and the spaces between Reema and her father carry the emotional weight rather than voice-over or explanation, and that single restraint decision transforms what could've been a well-meaning PSA into something achingly specific.