The checkpoint lasted forty minutes. I remember the plastic chairs, the smell of diesel, the officer who could not pronounce my surname and decided, eventually, that it did not matter. I thought that was the border. I was wrong about where it ended.
The border came with me. It was in the pause before a landlord said the flat was no longer available. It was in the teacher who praised my French as if it were a trick. It was in the supermarket queue, where my mother lowered her voice when she spoke Arabic on the phone, as if the language itself needed papers.
We do not cross borders once. We drag them behind us, and other people keep redrawing them.
The film follows three objects that crossed with my family: a coffee pot, a school certificate that no French office would recognise, and a key to a door in Beirut that no longer exists. None of them are useful here. All of them are still in the house.
I made this film to ask a simple question: if the border is something we carry, what would it take to set it down — and who else would have to agree?
