Home Abroad is a tragicomic film essay about the permanent battle waged by every immigrant against himself, and his surroundings.
Home Abroad is the last part in a triptych of essay films about division, the sequel to My own private war (IKON 2015) and My Friends (IKON/ZDF ARTE 2007). In these films, Lidija Zelovic tells her life story about the war in ex-Yugoslavia. It is her way of understanding and processing the past. By putting herself in the center, she dared to penetrate deeper into the core of the theme of division. And how divisions gripped Lidija’s compatriots, colleagues, friends, family, and ultimately herself. On a small scale, she told the big story of a country that was falling apart.
The common thread in the film is the renovation of Lidija’s house. While she tries to make a bedroom for her son in a small apartment in Amsterdam, she learns from friends who came to help with the renovation, when and if one feels at home. Most of her immigrant friends appear, each in their own way, to be estranged from the Netherlands. Is that a problem? Was it always like this? Lidija tries to put her finger on the sore spot and find out through her personal film archive whether she herself has become alienated after twenty-eight years of adaptation.
