True Voyage is Return

Is it true to state that the “true voyage is return”, as Ursula Le Guin wrote in her novel The Dispossessed? Or do the words of Thomas Wolfe and Chet Baker ring truer? "You can't go home again" – these are words which imply the impossibility of returning to the same place twice. The return home, to the place that shaped us and our parents into the people we are today, leads inevitably to the question: where even is home?

This film series explores diverse meanings of home and the act of returning to a place that no longer feels like a home anymore. Through a selection of documentaries, spanning various countries – from Turkey to China, from Palestine to Bangladesh – we follow the experiences of the (grand) children of immigrants traveling to their (parents’) homeland.

These journeys lead inevitably to the recent or distant history of the geographies in question, sometimes becoming a form of confrontation or memory work for the filmmakers. The intersection of the past and present, personal and collective memory can both alleviate and create tension. For this reason, these stories need to be told.

Necati Sönmez works as a film critic, journalist and documentary filmmaker. He is the initiator of Which Human Rights? Film Festival and one of the founders of Documentarist – Istanbul Documentary Days, which soon became the most important documentary festival in Turkey. He has served as jury member in over 30 festivals and curated documentary programmes as a guest curator. For 2021 he is a fellow at bi’bak.