Maia, a single mother, lives in Montreal with her teenage daughter, Alex. On Christmas Eve, they receive an unexpected delivery: notebooks, tapes, and photos Maia sent to her best friend from 1980’s Beirut. Maia refuses to open the box or confront its memories, but Alex secretly begins diving into it. Between fantasy and reality, Alex enters the world of her mother’s tumultuous, passionate adolescence during the Lebanese civil war, unlocking mysteries of a hidden past.

About the filmmakers

Filmmakers and artists, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige question the fabrication of images and representations, the construction of imaginaries, and the writing of history. Their works create thematic and formal links between photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and cinema. Since the 1990s, they have collaboratively directed numerous films that have screened across the world. The artists are known for their long-term, research-based projects that focus on personal or political documents, as well as their particular interests in invisible histories, like those of the disappeared during the Lebanese Civil War, the Lebanese space program from the 1960s, and the geological and archaeological foundations of modern cities.