Unfinished Journeys Home: Diaspora, Migration and the Redefinition of Home

Leaving, returning and being unable to return are the movements that connect these eight films. Repatriation situates the journey home within the history of the Korean Peninsula’s division; A Monologue about Home documents how war can place one’s homeland beyond reach; and Decoupling reveals the tangible effects of geopolitics on individual lives through the separation of a transnational family. Kampung Tapir, Pebble and Abdullah approach home through cross-border livelihoods, urban drifting and childhood migration, respectively, making it a matter of concrete choices shaped by everyday realities. Alice in the Wanderland transforms the experience of being unable to return home into fiction, while Havana Divas reconnects homeland and adopted home through Cantonese opera, migrant memories and a long-delayed return.

Spanning different regions, generations and cinematic forms, these films nevertheless ask the same question: when borders, war, work, illness or family push people away from the lives they once knew, is home a place, or a relationship that must continually be sustained and rebuilt?

Reaching from the Korean Peninsula and Ukraine to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Latin America and transnational Chinese communities, this selection follows people as they leave their homelands and search for a place to belong, their journeys shaped by war, borders, work and family. Viewed alongside one another, these experiences from different parts of the world suggest that “home” is more than a fixed location: it is also a web of relationships remembered, carried and rebuilt through migration.