Canada's Academy Award Nominee: Best Foreign Language Film

When notary Lebel (Rémy Girard) sits down with Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette) to read them their mother’s will Nawal (Lubna Azabal), the twins are stunned to receive a pair of envelopes – one for the father they thought was dead and another for a brother they didn’t know existed.

In this enigmatic inheritance, Jeanne sees the key to Nawal’s retreat into unexplained silence during the final weeks of her life. She immediately decides to go to the Middle East to dig into a family history of which she knows next to nothing.

Simon is unmoved by the posthumous mind games of a mother who was always distant and cold. However, the love he has for his sister is strong, and he soon joins her in combing their ancestral homeland in search of a Nawal who is very different from the mother they knew.

With Lebel’s help, the twins piece together the story of the woman who brought them into the world, discovering a tragic fate forever marked by war and hatred as well as the courage of an exceptional woman.

An adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s hit play, Incendies, is a deeply moving coming-of-age story that brings the horror of war to a starkly personal level, delivering a powerful and poetic testament to the indelible scars of the cycle of violence, and the uncanny power of the will to survive.

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