A Place You Leave - Short Documentary

A Place You Leave: Reckoning With Home

Published in Carnegie Mellon’s WOVEN Journal

“We view our homes with a notion of permanence that makes us feel secure. A home is a place to raise our children and grow old and its four walls are supposed to constitute a haven from the harsh realities of the world. We build our nations and construct our borders along this concept of permanence too, when, truthfully, no border is a constant in nature. The refugees and exiled immigrants forced to leave home all across the world illuminate the dissonance we live in.

Produced by a group of CMU first-year students, A Place You Leave is a ten-minute documentary highlighting the transience of home through the lens of immigration and exile. The film was developed as part of the first-year Grand Challenge Seminar, In Transit: Exile, Migration, and Culture, taught by Prof. Kenya Dworkin, Reem Alghazzi and Stephen Brockmann. The assignment associated with the film challenged students to create a 5-10 minute documentary with City of Asylum fellows, a unique organization in Pittsburgh that provides protection for artists in exile. In line with the work being done in class throughout the semester, this final project asked that students venture out into the real world and learn more about the worldwide refugee crisis, firsthand…”