I CAN'T GO HOME

Souraya, filmmaker, 6-months pregnant, arrives in Paris for a meeting concerning her next film just as a war breaks out in the Lebanon. She is forced to stay with her sister Mina, in exile in France for more than 10 years. From now on she experiences war from a distance, as a spectator, while her husband, Walid, a doctor, is at the heart of the conflict. She starts to film, making a kind of diary to fill the gap which separates them, to try to be closer to him.
The young woman projects her tragic, absurd and out of sync feelings onto the city in which she wanders, onto her prominent belly, onto activism…
Souraya changes, transforms: within her body, in her relationship to the future child, to Walid, her sister, her country and to images.

It's a story about love, about film, about commitment.
War has regularly surfaced in our lives over the last 31 years. But during the summer of 2006, stuck in France, we experienced the war from a distance, via the television and Internet, and images caught on mobile phones and sent to us from the Lebanon.
The main character in our film also experiences this war via digital means, through different image media she seeks out to find out and understand what is happening, but also as a means to stay in contact with Walid. Progressively, Souraya explores another kind of image, that of a diary addressed to the man she loves and is separated from, to the child is expecting alone in Paris. Beyond the on-going conflict, she is seeking to create an alternative way through this increasingly binary world.
This film tells of the Souraya's personal journey through this war and her attempts to invest another territory, that of film, in order to romanticise daily life and find reasons to still believe in this world.