Chicago Palestine Film Festival Turns 25 With 50+ Films

Colette Ghunim grew up in Schaumburg feeling like something was missing. She was Palestinian Mexican, but the suburbs offered little connection to either side of her heritage. She channeled that restlessness into volunteer work at the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, then eventually packed up and moved to California to make films herself. This spring, those two chapters of her life converge. Her debut feature documentary, “Traces of Home,” will open the festival’s 25th annual edition.

The Chicago Palestine Film Festival runs April 11-28 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. This year’s lineup tops 50 films, the largest the festival has ever assembled.

Ghunim began the project in 2017, wanting to understand what she’d grown up without. Her father left Palestine at age 4, displaced during the Nakba in 1948. Her mother fled Mexico in the middle of the night as a domestic violence survivor and crossed the border. Both parents had been forced to leave childhood homes behind, and neither had ever returned.

“In the beginning, it was very much just about finding the houses in Mexico and Palestine,” Ghunim said. “I wanted to bring my parents back to both of their childhood homes that they were forced to leave as children.”

Between 2019 and 2020, she traveled to both countries for the first time, camera in hand, parents alongside her. The Palestine leg of the trip hit differently than she had anticipated.

“We went to Palestine first in April 2019, and it was crazy because I thought I knew what was happening in Palestine based on the news and activist work, but nothing could prepare you for what you see on the ground itself,” Ghunim said. She watched her father transform, freed from the language and cultural barriers that had followed him through decades of American life. Palestinians celebrated his return, she said, after more than 70 years away.

Mexico brought its own emotional weight. Ghunim met extended family she had never known and sat with the question of what her mother’s life might have looked like if she had been able to stay.

What started as a search for buildings and addresses turned into something harder to name. Ghunim realized the disconnection she felt wasn’t simply about geography or culture. It went deeper.

“What does it mean to have this ambiguous loss of losing one’s cultural heritage?” she said. “I started to get the hint that it was actually something much deeper. This disconnect was not just to the cultures, but it was to my parents themselves and realizing that I was trying to find this sense of home because I didn’t feel it in my own house growing up in Schaumburg.”

The film premiered in November at DOC NYC, the country’s largest documentary festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. Ghunim also screened it at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Montana before bringing it back to the city where she first learned to love Palestinian cinema.

The Chicago Palestine Film Festival has been running since 2001, building an audience in Chicago that takes seriously the idea that film can carry stories across borders and generations. Its 25th year represents a milestone, and the expanded lineup reflects the breadth of Palestinian and Palestinian-diaspora storytelling that has developed over that time.

For Ghunim, opening the festival carries a particular kind of meaning. She spent years in the volunteer seats, watching films and supporting the organization. Now her own documentary, made over nearly a decade, will be the one welcoming audiences on opening night.

The festival runs through April 28. For anyone who has grown up between cultures, or wondered what it means to belong somewhere fully, “Traces of Home” offers a starting point that is honest about how complicated that question can be. Ghunim never pretends she found easy answers. She found her parents, a little more fully, and that turned out to matter more than any address.