In their newly bought car from Belgium, Angie takes her father Mansour on the same road trip he had made 39 years ago, from Brussels to Beirut. The path once taken is no longer the same, and neither will be their relationship.
In 1980, 32-year-old Mansour travelled to Belgium with his friends, bought cars, and set off on a long road trip fuelled by a love of adventure and discovery back to Lebanon, a country already tired from five years of an eventual 15-year civil war. Today, after 40 years, Mansour (70) is a retired geo-historian that still lives in Beirut and has not travelled ever since. It was only after his daughter Angie (30) left for Belgium to study that potent memories of this most adventurous time of his life have suddenly reawakened. Angie invites her father to Brussels to look for a new car and go on the same journey. The path, previously taken by Mansour, is no longer the same. On the 4,000 kilometres once crossed, countries have disappeared, and others were born. Some borders have faded, while others have emerged. Dictatorships have risen and fallen. Wars were extinguished, and others broke out, causing deaths, destruction and immense displacement along those same roads he once drove across. And Lebanon, caught between the sea and two conflicts, is no longer accessible by land. The journey of rediscovering the distance between Europe and Lebanon becomes an intimate discovery of the new father/daughter relationship beyond the borders of the traditional family context they are usually framed in.