yearning for home

The eternal yearning for home is most primally captured in Danish writer-director Nikolaj Arcel’s “The Promised Land,” starring Mads Mikkelsen as a low-class war veteran from Denmark who follows the urging of the mid-18th century Danish king to settle the near-barren, lawless area of the Jutland Heath.

They grew up in St. Louis, and though they lived out west for four years after college, they never stopped yearning for home.

The title of this mutedly touching piece seems applicable to both what Sosa’s mother and her siblings had to renounce after migrating north — the yearning for home that the director herself inherited — and what Julián himself wants his humble legacy to be once he’s departed.

There’s a striking romanticism to the scene – a return to nature after the horrors of the trenches, explicitly tied to a yearning for home: away from Europe and back to England.

“My dad is ever the optimist. It’s hard to see his smiling face and to imagine what he survived. The yearning for home never goes away. But it’s a lot easier to come to the US and have the opportunity of a start than it is to stay in a refugee camp, in limbo. The challenges were really all mine.”