Lahib Jaddo was born in northern Iraq as daughter of Turkmen parents. Under Saddam Hussein, the family was persecuted, and fled to Beirut. As a 22 year old, Lahib left Lebanon with her then husband and emigrated to the USA. They studied in New York, where they had two children and, shortly afterwards, separated. After the divorce, Lahib settled in Texas, where she raised her children alone and worked as an artist and a teacher of architecture at the Lubbock University. “Jaddoland” is the name she gave to the home she made for herself and her children: a house with studio and large garden. Sculptures, pictures, colors are a remembrance of her lost homeland in Iraq. So as not to disturb the family idyll, she doesn’t look for a new partner until her daughter Nadia, as well as her brother, move to California , after finishing High School, to study film. After graduating from her studies, Nadia decides to make a film about Jaddoland. Over a period of five years, the young filmmaker visits her home town, investigating the effects the diaspora had on the life and the works of her mother. Nadia learns to appreciate just how strongly she was influenced by her mother in her understanding of home and identity. At the same time, she senses resistance to this imprinting and feels the urge to form her own view. She begins to turn around the process. As a child, she often had to model for her mother. Now she begins to film her mother. When I began shooting for JADDOLAND, my mother was about to begin a series of landscape pictures which were to play with the similarity between Texan and Iraqi landscapes. I remembered how I used to observe my mother as a child, as she examined and sorted through old family photos and handwritten letters in Arabic with meticulous care. Today I know that she was doing it in order to piece together her own history. The contemplative work in her studio – the sanctum she created for herself – was her way of getting to the bottom of the winding paths of her life. As a child of immigrants, I would spin between different cultures, identities and expectations. As I began making films, I realized that my picture of world was double exposed. My mother’s view pushed itself into my own. So I had to learn to find my own view.”