THE HOMES WE CARRY por­trays a family torn apart by the tur­moil of world his­to­ry between Ger­many, Mozam­bique and South Africa. At the centre is Sarah, a young Afro-German mother. She wants her daugh­ter to have the rela­tion­ships she lacked as a child. There­fore, she trav­els with her to Africa, where her father and the child’s father are wait­ing for them. But meet­ing Lua­na’s father, who sud­den­ly has to grow up when Sarah shows up at the door with his daugh­ter, presents them with sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges.  

Mean­while, Sarah’s father, Eulidio, recalls the Mozam­bi­can con­tract work­ers’ almost for­got­ten and unjust his­to­ry in the former GDR. In his nos­tal­gic day­dreams, he returns to the ori­gins of his Euro­pean family and their sudden sep­a­ra­tion - a fate he shares with many other German-Mozam­bi­can fam­i­lies. 

Fit­ting in and family are often not as syn­ony­mous as they should be. Espe­cial­ly when putting the two in sync means tra­vers­ing dif­fer­ent time­lines, dif­fer­ent eco­nom­ic and racial real­i­ties. This is in addi­tion to cov­er­ing the geo­graph­ic areas of Ger­many, Mozam­bique and South Africa. For Sarah, a young Afro-German mother, these dif­fi­cul­ties must be over­come for the sake of giving her daugh­ter a fight­ing chance to belong to a family she fits into. How­ev­er, begin­ning this process by trav­el­ing with her daugh­ter to Africa, shows Sarah the true nature of the chal­lenges. Start­ing with her daughter’s father in Mozam­bique still trying to mature and her father in South Africa still trapped in the nos­tal­gia of the unjust his­to­ry of Mozam­bi­can Con­tract work­ers in the former German Demo­c­ra­t­ic Republic(GDR).  

As an obser­va­tion­al doc­u­men­tary, Brenda Akele Jorde skill­ful­ly shows the com­pli­ca­tion, the dif­fi­cul­ty and the injus­tice that can per­vade lives gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion. With the lens of her camera, she shows how nuanced it can be to grap­ple with issues of account­abil­i­ty, respon­si­bil­i­ty, belong­ing and most impor­tant­ly family.  

(Ulan Garba Matta, stu­dents’ plat­form)