Welcome Home
2017 · 16m · Norway
Directed by Armita Keyani
Tones: absurdist, humorous, tender
An Iranian refugee couple in northern Norway eagerly befriends the two Jehovah's Witnesses who knock on their door, oblivious to what the visitors are really after.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a Trojan horse comedy about conversion and cultural collision, but it keeps refusing to weaponize either side—which is either cowardly restraint or a genuinely weird commitment to ambiguity that I'm still not sure deserves credit.
Keyani holds the tonal balance between pathos and dark comedy with the kind of formal discipline that recalls Aki Kaurismäki's deadpan humanism, letting the absurdist setup do its work through restraint rather than punctuation.
The genius is that single choice to play the Witnesses' missionary zeal completely straight while the refugee couple's hunger for connection radiates so openly it rewrites what the scene actually means—suddenly it's not about who's hunting whom, it's about loneliness.
Reviews
Welcome Home surprises - challenging preconceived judgements and cultural attitudes through that most entertaining of lenses - humor. She succeeds at making the audience see Zarah and Aman as a part of "us" instead of feeling a distance between "them" and "us", eschewing the kind of easy and often crude cultural comedy that normally flows from fish-out-water scenarios.
I wanted to make a film where, hopefully, even the people who make those kinds of statements and questions can laugh too. I wanted them to be 'us' in the film, the audience. With this film I hoped to challenge the expectations and judgements we have of each other through humor.