Mitti

Mitti, the Punjabi word for soil or earth, takes its title seriously. The film follows Jasleen Kaur, a pulmonologist living in Ohio, as she travels to the village in Pakistan where her family's roots were before the 1947 Partition. For Jasleen, this is not a tourist's trip or an academic exercise. It is a return to a place she has never been but that is, in some essential sense, part of who she is. The soil her ancestors walked on, the buildings they may have touched, the landscape that shaped them.

The film captures the strangeness and the beauty of that experience: standing in a place that belongs to your history but not to your present, where the language may be familiar but the country is foreign. Jasleen's journey is also a physician's journey, attentive to the body, to what we carry in it, and to what the land we come from deposits in us whether we go back or not. Mitti is a deeply felt film about origin, identity, and the particular gravity of the places that made us.