MARRATEIN, MARRATEIN

مرتَين,
 مرتَين

Super8mm, 16mm, and AI-generated images of ancestors
transferred to HD, single-channel video, 25:00, 2025
/ Director / Writer / Camera / Sound / Edit /

World Premiere: 63rd Ann Arbor Film Festival 2025

Co-editor: Mary Jirmanus Saba
Score: Mike Khoury
Color: Shanna Maurizi
Sound Mix: Ernst Karel


Marratein, marratein is an essay film about two cities: Detroit and Beirut and the complicated relationships to place that crystallize over multiple generations. It is a film about belonging, diasporas, and the refracted memories of places known through other lifetimes. This film asks: what does it mean to return to a place you’ve never been? This film explores secondary trauma, intergenerational memories, and the complex relationships we have to “motherlands,” mothers, and our own progeny.




^{Press: “Julia Yezbick explores the uncertainty of belonging, identity in ‘marratein, marratein’,” Arab American News, Aug. 19, 2020.}

Image: marratein, marratein

My children do not belong to me. They travel their own arcs, ripples tumbling outward. Our pulses coincide only fleetingly.

You told me without telling me. In gentle voice. Inaudible.

Even clocks are made of circles.




I write to you from the third decade of the second millennium of the western calendar. I am in Detroit. I gave birth to two children. I have a house, a station wagon and a dog.