You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hume.

Director and writer Munia Akeel had to question the meaning of home when her hometown of Beirut was thrown into crisis.

Her talk from TED Women 2021 encourages all of us to dig into sorrow as a wellspring of joy, connection, and art.

So as you know, my comfort zone isn't here. It's usually on set behind a camera. So, yes, I was born in Beirut, Lebanon.

It's what I call my home country. It's the place where my first

memories are, where my parents live, where my first loves are, my first heartbreaks. I've lived

in other places and I've made them home, like New York, which I've fallen in love with and in.

But I always felt like my biggest strength came from the fact that I knew exactly where I came from,

and that knowledge was very important to me, because it really defined who I am as a woman.

But growing up in Lebanon comes with a price.

I think this tension and this, what I have between me and my home country

is something I cherish, but it's also a burden.

Because Lebanon is a place with a very contradicting soul.

It's a place filled with chaos and poetry, a place where

hope and despair coexist in really strange ways. It's also a place where joy and sorrow are

inseparable, like Khalid Jablanc in one of my favorite poems by our national poet mentions,

that well from which comes our laughter is also the one that hosts our tears.

And I think today, more than ever, this is true in Lebanon,

because after everything that happened,

it feels like a land of broken dreams,

but filled with so many dreams nonetheless. And growing up in Lebanon,

we were constantly on the verge of the worst. We felt like that silence between a crisis and the other

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