Kemo, a Bosnian immigrant, returns home to sell the house he was expelled from in 1992. However, the house “refuses” to be sold. Kemo has been living in Sweden for twelve years now and does not plan to return to his previous life in Bosnia. But it seems that the house does not share his view. Kemo tries to ignore it, but he fails in it for quite a time. He must find out the reasons, even if he could share them only with Zoka, his childhood friend, because Zoka is the one who can feel that there is a latent drama, when he says: “Kemo, you are not selling this house just like that, and it isn’t his true reason!”
Comparing Sweden with Bosnia, Kemo says: “I am not there and I am not here either!” He presses his finger into his own, yet universal immigrants’ wound, the wound inflicted on all those who have departed from his own homeland leaving something behind, but who may not have arrived fully to where they are residing now because they failed to find their new country there.
This film touches upon the issue of how we see ourselves and how others perceive us. The feeling that we do not belong and that we are not accepted by new community succeed to turn upside-down even the image of the country we have left behind. Kemo does not know who he is anymore. Once he utters his reason, it echoes with the familiar obtuse sound of the suppressed immigrants’ fire: Kemo wants to sell the house so that he can open a beauty parlour in Sweden! Not an ordinary beauty parlour for immigrants, though! A state-of-the-art beauty parlour! Only for Swedish girls!
Finally, Kemo is indecisive. We do not know his decision because he does not know it himself. He returns to Sweden, taking along the scents, the images, and the river. His nostalgia and the distance then turn into a specific perspective: It is like a staring of a shortsighted at distance. Kemo is a refugee from the world as such.