JO Magazine

Cherien Dabis' new film about immigrant angst and Arab family is making a splash in us theaters. Can it help to turn around years of anti-Arab images on screen?

Words by Nicholas Seeley.

RED NEON. WHITE TABLES. Rock ‘n’ roll. Any kid who went to high school in a small American town has probably spent hours in a diner like this, drinking endless cups of coffee and taking refuge from the cheerless exurbia outside. So it feels like the perfect environment to talk to Cherien Dabis about her new film, Amreeka, which blends American suburban angst with a very personal (and very funny) story about Arab families and the immigrant experience.

The night before this interview, a small Jordanian audience got its first look at the movie, which will hit theaters here in mid-November. But Amreeka has been making waves in the United States and Europe since January, when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Cherien is, as far as we can tell, the first Arab-American director to get substantial US distribution for a Middle East-themed film—and she did it without much help from Hollywood.

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In its first seven weeks Amreeka grossed about half a million dollars and earned lavish praise from film critics. The New York Times called it “one of the most accomplished recent films about a non-European immigrant coming to the United States.” Variety magazine said it was a “warm and inclusive vision of immigrant family life,” and The Boston Globe dubbed it “one of the richer movies you’re likely to see about average Arabs in America.” (One wonders what the others are.)

Cherien is thrilled that people are paying attention to her movie—but she isn’t as head-over-heels as you might think. There’s some genuine (non-teenage) angst evident as she nurses her next cup of black coffee. She wants her film to open a door for more Arab artists to get big funding for their ideas; more than that, she wants to see more Arabs step up to the plate and start supporting their own artists. And these things, she says, aren’t happening quite yet.

“I think the biggest challenge that we face right now—and that I’m currently facing, actually—is proving that there’s an audience for this kind of movie … getting our community to go to theaters to support these films.”

Making a film may be art, but getting it made is business. Arabs, and Palestinians in particular, have long felt the sting of not getting their stories told in the global culture-market the American film industry has created. But it’s not all a vast conspiracy. Cherien is certain that Hollywood will make any movie it thinks will make money.

“At the end of the day, sure: there is a certain level of discrimination in the United States,” Cherien says. “However, with this film we broke through all that. And not just did we break through it on the financing front—we made a movie that played at all the best festivals, that got tremendous reviews, that’s doing well, that really has a chance! It got a major distributor; we’re in 35 cities all around the country. … Now it’s on us to prove that we want to see more of these films, and the only way that we can do that is to go and support them, and to prove that we’re an audience to be taken seriously, and that people—the distributors, the producers—can make a profit.”

The half a million dollars the film has pulled in so far is good, she says, “but it’s not nearly exciting enough for people to perk up and say: ‘Oh, this kind of movie is profitable. We should be making more of these kinds of films.’”

And if getting people into theater seats is hard in the United States, it’s even harder in the Middle East. “Everyone wants to watch pirated DVDs, and that’s not helpful,” Cherien says. “People need to realize that. They buy pirated DVDs, and every time they do that they make it more and more difficult for an Arab artist to tell our story.”

'AMREEKA' TRACES THE JOURNEY of a divorced Palestinian woman named Muna and her 16-year-old son, Fadi. Together they emigrate to the United States, looking for new opportunities and a chance to start over. But in a moment of unfortunate synchronicity, they arrive in small-town Ohio on the very eve of the US invasion of Iraq. Thus begins their encounter with the whole strange brew that is Middle America: discrimination and acceptance, cold weather and human warmth.

The economy is lousy, and the only job to be had for a woman in her late 30s with mediocre English is flipping burgers; but American opportunity is represented by Muna’s better-off sister Raghda, who has been living in the States for years with her doctor husband, Nabeel, and their children.Still, as the wartime paranoia begins to run high, tensions erupt between the Arabs and the community, and eventually within the family itself.