Film - Raymond Nashar, 'el ajnabi', Australian Centre for the Moving Image

[WOMEN SINGING FOLK SONG]

RAYMOND NASHAR (VOICEOVER): I used to be Lebanese. At least I always knew I wasn't Australian. From a very young age, the mean kids would often tell me to go back to where I came from. Even though I'd never been there, it still made sense that I belonged there and that one day I would go back.

In 1994, my family and I spent five months in Lebanon. I was 15. For the first three days, I stayed in my room, by my grandfather's deathbed. People thought I was just jet-lagged. For the next week or so, I wandered the village of my forefathers with my headphones on, wondering what was happening back home-- back where I came from.

It was like another planet, and I was an alien. The buildings bore the scars of war and poverty. The streets weren't like Australian streets. They were just spaces between the buildings. It was beautiful, but it wasn't me.

I used to try and hang out with the boys. It was fun when some of them let me wear their army uniforms. Back in Australia, I cut my hair differently. I wore different clothes and different shoes, and I listened to different music to the Lebanese kids. My Lebanese was slower and had a lot of English words.

Slowly, I warmed to these strangers who are my blood. Discovering my heritage was an unforgettable experience. But losing my identity was scary.

In Lebanon, my relatives would refer to me as "el ajnabi"-- "the foreigner." I asked a cousin, and he said "you're not really Lebanese. Your home is in Australia. You're on a holiday here." And he was right. I wasn't even a citizen, because my mom worried I'd be conscripted if I applied.

I thought I'd discover who I was in Lebanon. Instead, I discovered two lands that I love completely but no place that I completely belonged to.

-This is me in Lebanon with my Lebo haircut and my Lebo jeans and my Lebo beach shoes. That's Lebanon.

[WOMEN SINGING FOLK SONG]

Film - Carla Pascoe, 'The Spaces in Between', Australian Centre for the Moving Image

CARLA PASCOE: (NARRATING) Photos with brief captions. I know only the bare facts of my family history, not the longings and desires of these people whose blood I share. They have secrets that have never been revealed to me.

Ours is the typical migrant success story. When he arrived from Lebanon, my great grandfather struggled as a hawker, but eventually established three shops. His son, my grandfather, won the money for his first bulldozer in a game of Two Up. From this he built a flourishing business.

These are the proud triumphs of our past, but as I grew older, I began to realize that there were some details unmentioned. I have never completely understood my great grandfather's departure from Lebanon. Family legend tells it he decided to come to Australia late at night during a drunken game of cards. Raymond then told his wife he was leaving without her. How could he leave his wife and small children, knowing that he would be gone indefinitely?

The next part of the story troubles me more. When [INAUDIBLE] followed her husband to Australia two years later, she brought three children with her, but she had six, all told. Finances forced her to leave three children behind. How did she decide which children to keep close, and which to leave far away, in the old country?

That decision had fatal consequences. When the family was finally reunited in the new land, two of the abandoned children found the adjustment impossible. One son drowned in the murky waters of Port Phillip Bay. Did he take his own life in despair? This is a question that no one wants to ask.

Behind many of my family photos depicting success and happiness are whole albums of photos that where never taken. Photos of loneliness, rejection, and grief. Images so blurred, I can only guess at their contents.

Between the bold facts of our history are the painful details that make our story human. Here, I reside. These are the spaces in between.

Film - Rita el-Khoury, 'Where do I Belong?', Australian Centre for the Moving Image

RITA ELKHOURY (VOICEOVER): Where do I belong? Am I Australian or Lebanese? Summer, 2006 in Lebanon was a dream come true for me and my friends. We were the Australians rocking downtown Beirut. The city was full of tourists and foreigners spending 24 hours a day "orlane". Waking up early, spending the day on a resort, then getting ready for dinner and clubbing was our daily routine, not forgetting the stopover every night at 4:00 AM for afterparty breakfast and the afternoon "algili" somewhere different every day.

On a perfect summer afternoon, having dinner on the beach, staring at the clear see, I found myself speaking about how much I love visiting Lebanon every year. Then my cousin said, how could you care about your country while you barely know it? You are only Lebanese by name. You're simply another tourist. All I was able to reply is I might be very difficult to understand that those of us who are outside do try to make a difference.

That night, Israel bombed Beirut Airport. My holiday was over. I had to leave, but I was unsure how. It cost us a $1,000 for cab to drive us to Damascus Airport. I did not stop asking him questions about safety. The roads were deserted. Time stood still. Unable to close my eyes for the whole 9 hour drive. I'll never forget that image on the Lebanese/Syrian borders; tourists waiting for their visas, buses blocking in the road, kids selling drinks, and people just randomly staring at each other.

In that taxi, I turned to my friend and said, we are safe and finally going back home. At that moment, I had referred to Australia being home. I had thought that Lebanon was my home, the place where I spent 11 years growing up. After that, I realized that I have two homes, so my fear of never belonging disappeared on a taxi journey escaping the war.

Film - Adam Nudelman, 'The Shoemaker', 'Enduring stories: Migrant memories' Stories from the Jewish Community ACMI Digital Storytelling

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NARRATOR: I'm always asked why I paint shoes. My poppy was a shoemaker. He was kind-- gentle but quiet. Except for work, he lived a frugal existence in almost complete isolation and squalor.

As far as I know, we were the only visitors to set foot inside their house. We only ever entered the back kitchen area. All the other rooms remained a complete mystery.

My great-aunt Manya rarely emerged from her self-imposed bedroom exile. As a child, I would sense her loneliness and sadness eking out through the keyhole.

My nana was once a very strong woman. She would regularly disappear into one particularly mysterious room, reemerging with gifts of socks, stockings, shoes, and sandals.

It was not until I stood beside my poppy's deceased body at the Jewish funeral parlor that I first truly realized my grandparents were Jewish. He-- along with my nana, great-aunt Manya, dad-- immigrated from Poland to Australia in late 1940s. They had somehow survived the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

My father and I had to clean up their house. What we found were rooms stuffed full to ceiling with rags, boxes, clothes, and other general bits and pieces. My nana's gift room was full, floor to ceiling, with brand new shoes still in their boxes. These had been left over from my poppy's shoe shop.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Within my paintings, I continually return to motifs such as shoes, shoe boxes, wooden dolls, towels, and humanless landscapes. I see these as vessels or narratives, each potentially containing small snippets of information about my grandparents and their families in that moment in history which had perversely affected them.

My discovery of my Jewish background has led me to explore and question my own identity. That's why paint.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Film - Firas Massouh, 'Hyper Ballad', Stories from the Lebanese Community ACMI Digital Storytelling

NARRATOR: When I was little, my father used to leave Beethoven's music playing on the Soviet made vinyl record player while I slept in my mother's arms. He even used to carve up little sticks out of wood for me to imitate symphony conductors. He read poetry to me, taught me how to play chess, and used to tell me about rare stones.

He was a geologist. His life was not an easy one, but it was my mother who told me stories of his part as a Communist activist during the late '60s in Syria. They were both arrested several times.

He moved from Damascus to Moscow to write his doctoral thesis. He met my mother, a medicine student, at Moscow University. They shared a similar past and they wanted to share a future together.

They married during one Russian summer. Then I was born. I became their new travel companion from Russia to the Ukraine, to Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Lebanon, and finally, Syria. My father was once again in a place they did not understand him.

He wanted to leave again. Australia, he said, the bottom of the world-- warm, quiet, and peaceful. But an opportunity to work in the Emirates had presented itself and we moved there instead. Australia started to become more of a reality while I was studying.

My father's fancy about that magical continents perhaps treated me to take the initiative to move to Melbourne and to live his dream. My ambition to travel and study was a choice that was provided to me by my parents, a choice that is rooted in a desire to pay tribute to my father, to thank him by continuing the spirit of discovery that he started. And one day, he will still make it here.