Where to?

Hamid moves abroad for greener pastures, leaving his wife and two sons to fend for themselves. The family survives with great labour and sacrifice, but its hard-earned stability is threatened when the younger son plans to emigrate. A touching neorealist parable around an eternal dilemma.

A pioneering work of post-independence Lebanese cinema, Georges Nasser’s piercing neorealist drama Where to? trains its lens on the lives of the rural poor, examining the hopes and anxieties that the prospect of international migration triggers within an agrarian community.

When his father leaves for Brazil to secure the family’s future, adolescent Said is obliged to drop out of school and help his sickly mother with the farm. His younger sibling Farid completes his education, without however being able to find a job. Desperate to make something out of his life, Farid decides to follow in his long-absent father’s footsteps and move abroad, much to the dismay of his mother. Balancing Farid’s existential restlessness with his family’s everyday hardships, Nasser’s film poignantly contrasts the anguish of those unable to escape their lot with the fallout of emigration on those who choose to stay back. 

Combining a simple mise en scène of a spare beauty with lyrical outdoor scenes set in ancient stone ruins, Where to? acquires the timeless quality of a moral parable. Yet, the fears and desires it addresses are all the more concrete today in a time of global economic migration and fading familial connections.

– Srikanth Srinivasan

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