yerham

A meditation on grief, memory, and family.

Synopsis

After the loss of her brother to suicide, Khitam returns home to Kansas City, stepping back into the rhythms of a family gathering in mourning. Blurring the line between documentary and narrative, the film uses real family members, real spaces, and real emotion to authentically capture the experience of collective grief. Yerham reveals identity in the details: the food, the language, the tenderness of a shared prayer, and the silences between words. The film invites audiences into an intimate space of loss while asking what it means to humanize experiences that are often unseen or flattened.

Directors’ Statement

We met in college, two young women from very different worlds who somehow found the same refuge in storytelling. Khitam, a chemistry student on the path to dental school, wandered into film classes as electives and found herself seated next to Julia, a screenwriting student raised in a household of actors. What began as an unlikely pairing became a lasting creative bond, one that has carried us through over a decade of trust, collaboration, and friendship.

Yerham is the most personal project Khitam has ever undertaken, and it is also the project that required the most trust. When a film is immersed in living grief of a real life family, the choice of who stands behind the camera matters profoundly. Julia’s self awareness, honesty, and human centered approach to storytelling made her the only filmmaker Khitam could imagine codirecting such a vulnerable piece with.

Blurring the line between documentary and narrative allowed us to honor both truth and craft, weaving real family, real spaces, and scripted memory into a portrait of collective loss.

At its heart, Yerham is about love. It is about the resilience of a family navigating tragedy, but also about how mourning is an extension of tenderness. Our hope is that audiences see in this story not only the specificity of one Palestinian family, but also the universality of grief: that to mourn is to be human, and to remember together is its own form of healing.

— Khitam Jabr & Julia Barnett

I created Yerham as both a personal act of mourning and a tribute to my family’s resilience and traditions. Returning home after the loss of my brother, I wanted to capture the texture of grief not as an abstraction, but as something deeply embodied, in the trembling of a prayer & the silence between words.

As a Palestinian filmmaker, my work is grounded in reclaiming and humanizing stories often reduced to statistics or headlines. With Yerham, I wasn’t interested in spectacle or explanation; I wanted to invite audiences into the intimacy of loss as it is truly lived, its heaviness, its tenderness, and its unexpected moments of connection.

My hope is that the film resonates universally, reminding us that while grief is deeply personal, it also binds us together. In honoring my own family’s journey, I aim to reflect a truth that transcends borders: that mourning is also a form of love.