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 Director: Cherien Dabis
Cast: Nisreen Faour, Melkar Muallem, Hiam Abbass, Alia Shawkat
Run Time: 96 minutes
Country: USA
Year: 2009
Language: English, Arabic with English subtitles
Rating: PG (Coarse language, drug use)
One of the most talked-about works at the 2009 Sundance
Film Festival, Amreeka is a stunning addition to the genre
known as social realism – those films that employ largely
unknown or non-actors to convey situations reflecting some
of the more sobering, harsh realities of the world today. This
humanistic film is deeply touching on many levels.
New York-based filmmaker Cherien Dabis was born to
Palestinian-Jordanian immigrants, and her remarkable first
feature tells a story very close to home. The narrative revolves
around protagonist Muna, a Palestinian woman who is happy
to get a green card to the United States and thereby leave her
West Bank home. She sets off with her teenaged son, Fadi,
and settles in small-town Illinois with her sister’s family.
The journey, of course, is riddled with trouble. Challenges
arise from the get-go as Muna is interrogated at the airport
and left humiliated and furious when her tin of cookies is
confiscated – it contained all the money she had in the world.
The film’s setting in the early days of the Iraq insurgency
adds a devastating intensity to Muna’s plight – everyone
from her region is treated like a suspect. Though she was a
bank clerk in Ramallah, the only job she can find in her new
home is flipping burgers, and her son has anything but an
easy time trying to get by in the disastrous social Petri dish
that is high school.
Yet despite these grim circumstances, redemption and
survival are indeed possible within the world of the film, in
no small part due to Mona’s infectious optimism and great
spirit. This is an evocative feature telling a story that really
must be told, from a perspective we are not always privy to
– the everyday, hard-working person caught up in events she
certainly did not have any control over but which have affected
the entire course of her life. Amreeka is riveting viewing.
“This piquant film brings a keen and serious eye as well
as that feeling for affectionate human comedy to this
fraught situation, smartly avoiding both stridency and
sentimentality in the process - it’s an elegant balancing
act.” - Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
Reviews: www.metacritic.com/video/titles/amreeka
Official site www.amreeka.com
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