Telling Her Story: An Interview With Cherien Dabis, Director of Amreeka

In March, Hollywood will roll out the red carpet to honor the achievements of professionals in the film industry. One film that was overlooked by the Academy this year is Amreeka, the debut film directed by Cherien Dabis. Amreeka, which received rave reviews at film festivals throughout 2009, tells the story of a Palestinian woman, Muna, and her son, Fadi, who leave the West Bank to settle in the suburbs of Chicago at the beginning of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.  In February, Ms. Dabis took time to speak with AAPER about her film, her experience as a Palestinian American and her plans for the future.

AAPER: What motivated you to make Amreeka? 

CHERIEN DABIS: Real life, actually. The movie was very much inspired by my family, and loosely based on what happened to us in a small town in Ohio during the First Gulf War. I was 14 years old during the First Gulf War and, prior to that moment in my life, I didn’t quite fit in. I was in denial of the fact that I was Arab at all and I just really wanted to be all-American and be like my peers. I felt different, but I never really felt racism or discrimination. I didn’t feel ostracized in any way.

All of that changed overnight with the first Gulf War. My dad literally went from being a local town hero because he was a doctor and a pediatrician (and people around town would often say, ‘your dad saved my son or daughter’s life’) to being the enemy. A lot of his patients marched into his office, asked for their medical records and walked out. My mother was not allowed to shop in certain stores because customers were threatening to boycott if she was seen there. We got death threats on a daily basis for a time. The Secret Service showed up at my high school because of a tip they received saying that my 17-year-old sister, who was outspoken in her government class, had threatened to kill the president. So it was a crazy, kind of absurd time. I lost friends in high school because the climate was that tense and that unwelcoming and that hostile. It made a huge impression on me and I can definitely say that it was life changing, and life altering, and life forming.

I started really thinking about who I was, and where my parents came from, and why people were thinking this about us, and where they were getting their information from. I started really paying attention to the news and seeing the way the media was perpetuating stereotypes. I was really struck by the injustice of it all at that point – only 14 [years old]. Not that I hadn’t thought about the politics of the Middle East prior to that moment. I had been to Palestine, I had seen the refugee camps and I’d had that moment where I was like, “Oh, now I understand what it is to be Palestinian.” But this was different. That [Palestine] was someplace that I could visit and leave. I don’t know that I understood, at age 14, the implications of everything that was going on. But what happened with us in a small town [in the United States] - it just changed my entire outlook. And I vowed at that point in my life to tell our side of the story. It really struck me that no one got to hear it from us. No one got to hear from us what our experience was, and what was happening, and how we were just like them and not people to be feared. My father didn’t ever buy a gun - he bought two baseball bats because of the threats that we were getting. And yet they thought that he was a terrorist. It was just so absurd, from my point of view, that I wanted to tell that story, with the same level of absurdity, from an insider’s point of view.

AAPER: Muna is an incredibly optimistic character. Where do your characters, who have lived under occupation for 40 years, draw their strength?

CD: One of the places they draw their strength is from each other, from having one another; it’s from the love of their families. I did not grow up under occupation; I was the first in my family born in the U.S. We returned every summer to Jordan and, when I was younger, we would go back to the West Bank. But when I was eight years old, we had such a humiliating experience on [the Israeli-controlled border between Jordan and the West Bank], where all of us were strip searched, including my infant sisters, and our things were confiscated and my dad was screaming at the soldiers. He vowed to never take us back to the West Bank. So we would spend our summers in Jordan and my dad would go to the West Bank, alone, which always made me really sad. I wanted to go back, and I did go back on my own, 20 years later. Since then, I’ve been going back regularly.

My experience of being Palestinian was of having an identity crisis. It was not knowing who I was or where I belonged. It was the love of my family and the sense of humor that we have. And there were so many things that I identified with being Palestinian that I drew strength from and that I saw my family drawing strength from. I think that that’s what the heart of the movie is. It’s not the bleakness of living under occupation because that’s not my experience and, also, because I wanted to show another side. We can’t survive occupation without the love of family and without a sense of pride in who we are and how beautiful our culture is. And all the things we’ve contributed to the world -- everything from algebra to chess to coffee. I grew up very much with a sense of pride about all of that and I wanted to show that. And I think that that’s where we draw our strength.

AAPER: Have you been surprised by the reception Amreeka has received in the United States?

CD: I was definitely surprised at first. I think the timing was really interesting in that Obama was just elected – the world premier at Sundance was just three days before his inauguration. I think that was really fortuitous timing. And I think that, with Israel’s bombardment of Gaza last year, I saw a shift in consciousness in the U.S. For the first time ever, in my experience anyway, people seemed really to be asking the questions, “Why is this happening? Why is there such a disproportionate amount of violence?” I’d never heard that before. In all my years growing up in the U.S., I’d never heard anyone ask that question - it was so mind-boggling that they finally were! And so it seemed to me that Amreeka coming out coincided with something that was already happening in the U.S. An openness that people were feeling, one, toward the immigrant story in general, and two toward the story of the other - the other, at that time, being the Middle Easterner because of everything that’s happening in the world. There was a real openness that surprised me. But when I put it in the larger context, I kind of understood why it was happening.

I also think that people really related to the sense of humor in the movie and to the character of Muna, her strength and her love. I think that it was unexpected for them because they’re used to seeing Middle Eastern stories that are bleak, characters that are darker and stories that are darker. I think, in some ways, that that surprised them. But overall, I was kind of blown away at first.

AAPER: I think that one of the things that sets Amreeka apart is how naturally the audience can connect to and identify with the characters. Do you think this would have been any less the case if the family was Muslim rather than Christian?

CD: No, because I wanted to minimize religion in the movie. If they were Muslim -- if they were wearing the hijab [head scarf] -- maybe people would identify less. Although I would have wanted to normalize that in a way and make it so that it’s not a big deal. In some ways, seeing it come on and off [at home] would have been just your average mundane, daily event, not to be made a big deal out of. I wanted to stick to the truth of my own experience, which is part of the reason I made them Christian. And I minimized religion anyway because I feel, as Palestinians, when it boils down to it, we end up being either a religious or a political issue or some kind of combination. I wanted to draw us as humans first and foremost, and let that other stuff fall into the background.

AAPER: The cast is amazing. Did you seek out individual actors or did they come to you through a more traditional casting process?

CD: It was a rigorous casting process. I traveled for six or eight months, all over the U.S., Canada - we even did a casting session in Paris -- and then all over the Middle East, from Beirut to Amman to Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Haifa. I was kind of all over the map: seeking out actors; watching every Middle Eastern movie I could get my hand on; and watching plays, watching television shows; really talking to a lot of people [in order] to tell them what I was looking for so that they could recommend people to me. And that’s eventually how I found Muna. It was through an actress in Ramallah who acted as my casting director. She sat down with me and asked me what I was looking for in this character. We talked for three hours about what I wanted – everything from what she looked like to what her relationships with her mother and her son were like. Three hours later, she wrote down four names. Nisreen Fahroud [the actress who played Muna] was the very first name on her list. It was a very cool process. It wasn’t at all the traditional way of casting; it was much more intimate.

AAPER: Shortly after the invasion of Gaza last winter, an aide to a member of Congress told me that what the Palestinians need is a Steven Spielberg; that grassroots and political activism are all well and good, but, in this country, a blockbuster hit is what will change minds and attitudes and thus the politics of the United States. In making Amreeka, did politics come into play for you?

CD: Oh, absolutely. The conceiving of Amreeka was all about my personal politics and wanting to normalize that in the fabric of American popular culture. I would love to be the Palestinian Steven Spielberg – the American Steven Spielberg for the Palestinians? I’m trying to put it in a way that makes it a little bit more mainstream sounding! And actually, this works because my mom thinks there are only two directors in the world - me and Steven. Sorry, everyone else, but we’re the only two that exist! I think that that’s absolutely what I had in mind.

I was really hoping that Amreeka would break out and become that blockbuster hit. That was, in part, why I couched it in so much comedy and why I made it that all-American, immigrant-genre story. Every immigrant group in the U.S. has their own immigrant story. And we didn’t [in popular culture], until Amreeka came along. I wanted it to be that and I think it is. I think that it broke many boundaries and it was the first in many, many regards. I would have hoped that it broke out and played at malls in middle-America. I think that the subtitle issue [40% of the film is in Arabic with English subtitles] is one thing that kept it from doing that. That’s unfortunate, but there’s always the next one. This was just the primer – this was just preparing people!

AAPER: What do you want your audiences to come away with after watching your film?

CD: A number of things. One, I want them to come away looking at themselves and wondering how they’ve contributed to these kinds of situations. I want them to come away with more of a sense of openness and an understanding that these stereotypes are untrue. And I want them to walk away with a sense of love, a sense of hope - that they know these people, that they really like the characters. What I love is when people walk out of the theater saying, “What happens to them? I want to know more! I want to live with them! I want to meet them! I really love them!” That’s really nice because I think, in some way, this movie was like my 14-year-old, juvenile response to “I’m just like you – love me! Don’t be mean!” It’s such a simple thing and it’s almost embarrassing to say out loud, but it came from that very human, very urgent, very real need.

AAPER: What is next for you as a filmmaker?

CD: I’m currently working on my next screenplay, and I’m hoping to shoot that in the fall. It’s kind of the reverse of Amreeka in some ways. It’s about a Palestinian-American who goes to Jordan for the summer to plan her wedding, despite the fact that her whole family disapproves of the groom. In some ways, it takes a look at the Palestinian Diaspora, from the point of view of being so close [to Palestine] but not able to go, of being able to see Palestine but not being able to get there.

Amreeka is distributed by National Geographic Entertainment and is available for purchase through Virgil Films.