The director made her mark in 2020, when her short film Brotherhood, was selected for the Oscars. In it, a family in northern Tunisia grapples with their sons’ decision to join ISIS in Syria. Who do I Belong to is an expansion of this story, featuring the same actors from the short film. Aicha lives with her husband and youngest son in the remote north of Tunisia. They  live in fear after the eldest sons, Mehdi and Amine, left to join ISIS in Syria. Unexpectedly, one of the sons, Mehdi, returns home with a  pregnant wife, fully clad in her niqab. The village, shaken by supernatural signs it cannot decipher, seeks in the woman’s  gaze the answers to understand the origin of the eerie happenings that have affected it since the day of Mehdi’s return, but  in the woman’s distant  eyes there is no answer. The conflict at the heart of the film is universal and it is a dual one: on the one hand, Who do I Belong to stages the torment of loving someone without being able to understand or recognize him anymore. The son who was thought lost returns home, but the agnition is aborted: something inside Mehdi  has transmigrated to an unattainable elsewhere, but maternal love welcomes and forgives, without asking, without having to or wanting to know. On the other hand  it gives shape to Mehdi’s suffering and tremendous guilt, which, thanks to the courage of the director becomes a very powerful and universal metaphor for the devastating consequences of war, which, if it does not destroy bodies and minds at the front, it annihilates through the intolerable guilt feelings that persist, poisoning the soul, even when the war is long gone. An overwhelming and courageous first feature, intense and elegant, in which every element has diegetic value, gripping cinematography, eerie sound, and contributes to the creation of a mysterious atmosphere  that undermines our reliance on empirical truth in favor of something more bewildering and intuitive. Teresa Cavina