Incendies

After their mother suffers from a stroke at a community swimming pool, twin brother and sister receive final requests in their immigrant mother's will. To fulfill these wishes, they must journey to her birth land in an unnamed Middle-Eastern country (based on Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war). The movie contains a series of flashbacks to the mother's life (Nawal Marwan). Nawal, a Middle-Eastern Christian gets pregnant from a refugee (likely a Palestine refugee in Lebanon). Nawal's infuriated brothers kill her lover as they try to escape. She reveals to her grandmother that she is pregnant. They keep the pregnancy secret in order to save face. Upon the baby's birth, the grandmother tattoos the infant's heel, and they give the baby boy away. Nawal follows her promise to her grandmother to study in Daresh (a fictional city) during which a Civil War breaks out. Under threat of war, Nawal returns to find her lost son. War has preceded her arrival as she discovers her son's orphanage has been destroyed. She then pretends to be a Muslim to board a bus with other Muslims fleeing to get to the camp where her son has been moved to. On the way to the camp her bus is attacked by armed Christians. She and a Muslim woman and her daughter survive, only to have the bus covered in gas to be burnt. Nawal escapes by showing her cross. They would not spare the woman, so Nawal claims the other woman's daughter as her own. However, the daughter runs back to the bus and is shot. Disillusioned, Nawal joins a radical organization. She is planted as a French tutor for a prominent Christian leader and assassinates him. She is sent to prison, where she becomes known as the woman who sings. Before her release after 13 years in prison, she is raped by the torturer Abu Tareq. She becomes pregnant and gives birth to twins in the jail. A nurse secretly saves the babies and returns them to Nawal after her release. They emigrate to Canada. After her death many years later, Nawal leaves a will requesting that her children, Simon and Jeanne, find their father and lost brother. Simon refuses, but Jeanne continues on her own, following in her mother's footsteps. She finds her extended family, who refuse to speak to her because of the shame her mother brought on the family. She then finds the prison and learns from a former employee that her mother was raped and gave birth in prison. He gives her the name of the nurse who birthed the babies. Distraught, she calls Simon to join her. He arrives with their mother's former employer from Canada. They find the nurse and ask for the baby born in prison. Only when the nurse reports that their mother gave birth to twins, do Jeanne and Simon become aware that they have been searching for themselves the whole time. A local solicitor identifies the name of their lost half-brother as Nihad. He further manages to trace the warlord who seized the new orphanage where Nihad had lived following the destruction of the first, and arranges for a meeting. Simon learns that Nihad had been taken in by the warlord, turned into a soldier, and eventually became a torturer at the prison where their mother was held. He was then known as Abu Tareq. Having discovered that their father is their half-brother, they find out that he too had moved to Canada. They find him, and deliver the letters from the mother. We learn that after many years, while swimming in a pool, Nawal spots a man with a tattooed heel. Meeting her rapist and lost son again after so much time, she suffers from a stroke and dies shortly after. At the end, her son visits her grave after he learns what he had done to his own mother. From the names (Christian) and the fact that Nawal's lover is "from the camps", the Marwan family are likely Christian Lebanese (further, Maronite, since Nawal's uncle's name is "Charbel"), while her lover is Palestinian. However, Nawal's accent, as well as her family's and most of the actors, is not Lebanese.