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Amreeka (Film)
Rating: M
Running Time: 96
Country: USA
Director: Cherien Dabis
Cast: Hiam Abbass, Nisreen Faour, Melkar Muallem, Alia Shawkat
Distributor: Sharmill
Film Worth: $11.50
Release Date: November 19, 2009
An entertaining and heartwarming film despite the very serious subject matter and slightly contrived premise.
Like 2008's Towelhead, Amreeka uses modern history to tell a story about the Arab immigrant experience in America. While the confronting Towelhead centred on a Lebanese-American father and daughter at the time of the First Gulf War, Amreeka - about a Christian-Palestinian mother and son - is set in 2003, during the US invasion of Iraq. The two films couldn't be more different, but both use Iraq to talk about racism.
Divorced mum, Muna (Nisreen Faour), and her son, Fadi (Melkar Muallem), have left the West Bank for Illinois to live with Muna's sister, Raghda (Hiam Abbass), and her family. Fadi faces racist taunts and becomes increasingly Americanised, while educated Muna searches fruitlessly for a banking job. Raghda and her husband are under financial stress - he's a doctor, rapidly losing clientele thanks to anti-Arab sentiment, and Muna fears that she's a burden. She takes a job in a fast food joint, but in an elaborate charade, pretends that she's somewhere higher up in the world's pecking order (one telling scene has her brother-in-law tell her that he's surprised that she's found success in America, and that he thought she'd fail...and wind up working in a fast food joint).
Amreeka, a US/Canadian co-production that picked up a critics' award at Cannes, is one of those gems that takes on serious themes and packages them into something that's often amusing and genuinely entertaining. Writer/director Cherien Dabis - an American with a Palestinian/Jordanian background making her feature debut - has a good eye for taking everyday images and making them special, and has the knack of getting natural performances from her cast.
Sure, Amreeka is somewhat predictable, and perhaps the situations a little contrived, but it's also an enriching film filled with humour and hope. If you thought Towelhead was a bit much, then this is the antidote.