A documentary film screening of "Home, Elsewhere"

a film by Megha Wadhwa

June 30, 2026 / 18:00-19:30

Room L-821 (8F, Library) / No registration necessary

Discussant: David Slater (Professor emeritus, Sophia University)

Home, Elsewhere follows Karan, a Gen Z migrant from India navigating his life in Berlin. What begins as a chance encounter with the filmmaker—an anthropologist who left India 20 years ago—evolves into a four-year long-term observation of Karan’s migrant life in transition.

From the structured world of a student fraternity to a more fluid, international university life, Karan’s journey unfolds alongside other young migrants shaping their own paths. The film reflects on distance, belonging, and the shifting meaning of home through moments of cooking, celebrations, and conversations.

The film quietly observes a generational continuity, interwoven with the filmmaker’s own migration story nearly two decades after she left India, concluding between love for home and the realities that continue to push its youth to leave.

Director /Camera: Megha Wadhwa 

Featuring: Karan Khatter and his Friends 

Editors: Megha Wadhwa, Nour Yazbeck

Additional Footage: Karan Khatter, Aditi Chengappa 

Sound Artist: François Yazbeck

Subtitles: Megha Wadhwa, Ben Stubbings

Editorial Advice: Andy Lawrence

Length: 47 minutes; Language; English, Hindi, German; Subtitles: English

Megha Wadhwa, Ph.D. is a filmmaker, anthropologist, and author based in Japan, where she serves as an Assistant Professor at Sophia University. She is the author of Indian Migrants in Tokyo: A Study of Socio-Cultural, Religious and Working Worlds (Routledge, 2021) and a regular contributor to The Japan Times. Her latest book chapter, Contesting Invisibility: Stories of Indian Migrant Women in Japan, was published in Empirical Art: Filmmaking for Fieldwork in Practice (Manchester University Press, 2025).

Trained in visual ethnography and fieldwork-based storytelling, she has directed several films, including Daughters from Afghanistan (2019), Indian Cooks in Japan (2020), Finding Their Niche: Unheard Stories of Migrant Women (2022), and Home in the Making (2025).

This event is organized by Hannah Holtzman (Assistant Professor, Sophia University) and Megha Wadhwa (Assistant Professor, Sophia University) for the ICC Research Unit “Visual Studies and Displacement in/to Japan”.