Another Road Home

“You always used to iron my army uniform?” The Israeli filmmaker Danae Elon at long last poses this question to her Palestinian babysitter Mahmoud “Musa” Obeidallah. Musa, a father of eleven children himself, was hired by Danae's left-wing intellectual parents as a childminder shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967 in Jerusalem. Musa took care of Danae for twenty years. With the money he earned, he sent his sons to America. Danae Elon now lives in New York herself. After the attack on the World Trade Center, she decides to look up Musa and his children. This quest brings her from New Jersey, where she finds six of Musa's eight sons, to the Palestinian village Battir in the occupied territories. Elon keeps asking questions, about the past, about certain delicate subjects in both families and about the how and why of the situation in their joint “homeland.” Through these questions, the film gradually brings to light the subdued frictions slumbering between her and her pseudo-brothers, between the Obeidallah family and her own family, between her and her father. It is the loving, striking Musa, who gives an answer to all questions.