By Yvette Nahmia-Messinas, The Jerusalem Post

Read the full review at The Jerusalem Post.

On Uprooting and Re-Rooting of Human Roots, In Her Footsteps.

In modern times we often experience the uprooting and re-rooting of our roots. We move from one city to another, from one country to another from one continent to another. At times we move for a known and defined period of time, at others for unknown and undefined periods, and at times we uproot and re-root ourselves in new villages, cities and lands again and again. At times we relocate by choice but at others it is forced upon us by war or other predicaments.

In our family we have re-rooted both by force and choice. My father as a kid had to escape his hometown Ioannina in northern Greece to go in hiding in Athens in 1943 at the time of the Nazi occupation of Greece. Since then he has re-rooted and lives in Athens.

At eighteen I left my hometown Athens, to study in Israel where I replanted my Athenian Jewish roots to Jerusalem.

Even when there is a choice involved, uprooting oneself from ones' family and circle and creating a family of one's own at a geopolitical, cultural and social distance from the source family is not an easy thing.

It is to this sense of uprooting oneself that I identified with in Rana Abu Fraiha's documentary film titled "In her Footsteps." Produced by Ibtisam Mara'na Menuhin the film follows Rana's mother, who is sick of cancer and wishes to be buried in Omer, the city she "fled" to from Tal-a-Sabeh with her Bedouin husband in the dead of night.

Continue to the full review at The Jerusalem Post.