Filmmaker Hogir Hirori lives in Sweden with his pregnant wife. When he sees images of millions of people fleeing Iraq as ISIL advances, he decides to return to his native country to document the tragedy.
He knows the area, speaks the language and above all, knows what it is like to be a refugee. He fled Kurdistan in 1991 when he was 11 years old.
When he arrives, he is invited to join a helicopter transport to the Shingal Mountains, where hundreds of thousands of people are stranded without access to food or water, surrounded by forces of the Islamic Stae of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.
On his way to the helicopter, Hirori finds Souad, an 11-year-old girl lying on the ground on her own, in the scorching heat and in severe pain.
He decides to stay and help her instead of boarding the helicopter, a fateful decision which Hirori believes saved his life. When Souad unexpectedly disappears, Hirori becomes absorbed with finding her again. As he travels to Iraq several times over the course of the next year and a half, he captures a rare insight into the resulting humanitarian crisis as it unfolds.
