When director Asmae El Moudir finds an old picture postcard of a mountain village among her mother’s belongings, it brings a remarkable story to life. The picture is of Zawia, the village in Morocco that her mother left as a child and never returned to. El Moudir decides to go to this remote place. In Zawia, where time seems to have stood still, she embarks on a quest into her mother’s past, and thereby her own. She connects on a personal level with women and girls in the village, and one of the young girls is Oum Aleid. The better El Moudir gets to know her and her family, the more she realizes how different her life would have been if her mother had stayed in the village. What begins as an intimate, personal journey in search of her family’s roots, evolves into a universal story about emancipation, migration, and the human longing to belong to a community.
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