Synopsis

Teresa is about to become a grandmother, but she's not a grandmother-to-be like any other. She's only forty-two years old and has lived in Freetown, Sierra Leone, since she was sixteen, where she arrived as a refugee. Twenty-six years earlier, in 2024, Teresa had to leave poverty-stricken Germany to embark with her family on an interminable journey of hope to the Sicilian coast: the only point of departure for all migrant boats headed for Africa. This is because since the turn of the millennium, the world has turned upside down. African countries are the richest on Earth, while European ones, plagued by years of economic recession, climate crisis, and numerous wars, have become unlivable. Thus, every day since then, an endless mass of refugees has attempted to leave the poverty of the Global North in search of a better future. Teresa is among those fortunate few who have made it, but at a very high price. Now, as she waits in the hospital for the miracle of life to happen again, she thinks back on everything she risked, the violence she endured, and what she lost crossing the Mediterranean twenty-six years earlier to reach her promised land. The place she could finally call home.