Incendies

Following the death of their mother Nawal, an Arab immigrant in Canada, Jeanne and her twin brother Simon meet with French Canadian notary Jean Lebel, their mother’s employer and family friend. Nawal’s will makes reference to not keeping a promise, denying her a proper gravestone and casket, unless Jeanne and Simon track down their mysterious brother, whose existence they were previously unaware of, and their father, who they believed was dead. Jeanne accepts; Simon, on the other hand, seemingly having had a more difficult relationship with Nawal and her apparently unusual personality, is reluctant to join Jeanne on this pursuit.

A series of flashbacks reveal Nawal came from a Christian Arab family in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, and that she fell in love with a refugee named Wahab, resulting in her pregnancy. Her family murders her lover and nearly shoots her as an honour killing, but her grandmother spares her, making her promise to leave the village after the birth of her baby and start a new life in the fictional city of Daresh. The grandmother tattoos the back of the baby’s heel and sends him to an orphanage.

While Nawal is at university in Daresh, a civil war and war crimes break out with Nawal opposing the war on human rights grounds. Her son’s orphanage in Kfar Khout is destroyed by a Muslim militant, Chamseddine, who converts him into an Islamic child soldier. After barely escaping the massacre of a bus full of Muslim refugees by Christian Nationalists, Nawal narrowly manages to join the Muslim fighters, and eventually shoots a nationalist leader. She is imprisoned in Kfar Ryat and raped by torturer Abou Tareq, consequently giving birth to the twins.