You can never escape a war. You take it with you wherever you go. All it takes is a handful of secrets and a terrible murder for old scars to turn into fresh wounds, and what at first appears to be Islamist terrorism turns out to be very much worse.
‘Heim’ takes place in a refugee centre in Berlin-Tempelhof airport, which though technically out of service is still “welcoming” different departing and arriving sort of people. They’re not the fancy passersby travelling to their own ends—they’re now deemed refugees whose life practically stopped here, paused on standby mode. The airport is thus a limbo they are stuck in. Not only their destiny is what we see here, but also that of the German characters accompanying them. As the German employees living through this experience are not better off; they are no longer the smartly dressed captains and crews, nothing more than exhausted overworn employees, obsessed with the duty of “protecting” a-la carte this modern Tower of Babel they found themselves part of. It’s a testing ground for different identities and clashing worlds, where people come to the realisation that however much we understand about each other, it’ll never outweigh how much we don’t understand. No one can witness nor come close to this absurdity hoping to stay the same. No one enters this limbo and leaves the same; lives here change completely, once and for all.
