CU filmmaker finds inspiration in her past

Eight years ago, Cherien Dabis entered her first year at the Master of Fine Arts film program at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Mere days after her arrival, the city experienced the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and the prejudice she had suffered in her youth during the Gulf War suddenly resurfaced—Arabs and Arab Americans were subjected to suspicious and hostile behavior by their fellow Americans.

“That was when I realized that it was time to sit down and write my version of the coming-to-America story,” Dabis said in an interview. The result was "Amreeka," the story of a Palestinian mother and son, Muna and Fadi, respectively, who come to America in search of a new life.

"Amreeka" is in many ways a personal story. Dabis, a Palestinian American who grew up in Ohio, experienced the same cultural confusion and suffered from prejudice similiar to that which Fadi (Melkar Muallem) and Salma (Alia Shawkat) experience in her film. Of her experience growing up, Dabis said, “For most of my life I felt like I wasn’t American enough for the Americans, nor was I Arab enough for the Arabs.” When the first Gulf War began, Dabis’s family received death threats, and her father’s medical practice started losing patients. The Secret Service even investigated a rumor that her 17-year-old sister had threatened to kill the president.

These experiences fueled Dabis’s creative fire. She had a unique story to tell—the story of Arabs living and immigrating to America in a hostile political climate.

The story that resulted is an amalgamation of characters and experiences from Dabis’s life, which speaks to more universal challenges of immigration and the issues of being Arab in a largely white community. When Muna (Nisreen Faour) and her son Fadi receive permission to immigrate to the U.S., they expect a free, top-notch education and plentiful job opportunities. Instead, they find a cold and at times hostile community in the Midwest. As Dabis puts it, “America is better, or different, in some ways, but there’s still not that sense of home or of belonging that we all seek.” Instead of the humiliation of interrogations at Israeli checkpoints, they are subjected to ethnic slurs from ignorant American neighbors. As Dabis explained, “They’re trading one set of problems for another.”

"Amreeka"’s subject matter may be controversial, but the movie itself is rife with the conventions of a heartwarming family film with a strong cultural message­—it includes the indispensable family dinner scene and the stale dialogue of sassy teenagers trying to assert their individuality with foreign-born parents. Yet these conventionalities also make it clear that Arab Americans are just like other immigrants—living, loving, and struggling together. “I want people to walk out of the theater feeling like they know us, like they’d just celebrated the culture with us,” Dabis said.

At its core, the film is a family story about building a home in a less-than-welcoming world. The portrayal of Muna’s innocence by Faour and the honest portrayal of Fadi by Muallem help capture the simple, good intentions of foreigners trying to find their way in a distant land. As Dabis put it, “I wanted to show that ultimately home is wherever we choose to make it: home is family; home is the familiar voice of our mothers on the other end of the telephone … for a lot of us, home has to be whatever and wherever we want it to be.”

"Amreeka" is currently playing at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas (On Broadway between 61st and 62nd streets). Tickets are $12.