What I take home (no pun intended) from this TIFF is a lot of thinking about home. In German, two words fill the shoes of "home", with Heimat meaning home country, spiritual home, and Zuhause meaning one's house or place. Both came into play a lot this year.
Divided home countries of course provide a lot of inherent drama, from the partitioned India-Pakistan-Bangladesh of Midnight's Children --or subtler questions of being at home in a beleagured religion, society, country in The Reluctant Fundamentalist --, Germany --plans of escape from East to West in Shores of Hope--, Korea --Camp 14's protagonist yearning for the known world of the North Korean prison camp he was born into rather than the rampant alien and capitalism of South Korea that he just cannot enter.
There's home as a question of exiles (Hannah Arendt), home as your mother tongue, the language in your head (Hannah Arendt), home as refuge and shelter --even if it it is a cave as a hiding place from Nazi persecution in No Place on Earth . In Lore, a disoriented ideology and a country in ruins, hardly recognizable in more than one way, are homes --comfort, guidance, belonging and a connection to one's past, one's family-- lost.
Our Little Differences (see photo) closes with this scene:
Jana, the Bulgarian cleaning lady: I want to go home.
Sebastian, her German employer: You mean your country?
Jana: I mean home.
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
