The OPC is privileged to offer a screening of the film "Amreeka," which chronicles the adventures of Muna, a single mother who leaves Ramallah in the West Bank with Fadi, her teenage son, with dreams of an exciting future in a small Illinois town.
The film "Amreeka" chronicles the adventures of Muna, a single mother who leaves Ramallah in the West Bank with Fadi, her teenage son, with dreams of an exciting future in the promised land of small town Illinois. In America, as her son navigates high school hallways the way he used to move through military checkpoints, the indomitable Muna scrambles together a new life cooking up falafel burgers as well as hamburgers at the local White Castle.
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Muna and Fadi at the U.S. immigration window.
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Told with heartfelt humor by writer-director Cherien Dabis in her feature film debut, Amreeka is a universal journey into the lives of a family of immigrants and first-generation teenagers caught between their heritage and the new world in which they now live and the bittersweet search for a place to call home.
After daily humiliations at checkpoints, a boring bank job and a nagging mother, Munadecides to leave Palestine for a new life, but her timing is bad since they arrive in America just as U.S. troops are entering Baghdad, an unwelcoming time and place to be from the Middle East.
The director Cherien Dabis grew up in a Palestinian/Jordanian family in rural Ohio who also experienced first-hand the ostracism of being an Arab during the first Gulf War. “For most of my life I felt like I wasn’t American enough for the Americans, nor was I Arab enough for the Arabs. And as a Palestinian, I inherited my father’s quandary in not having a nation or a national identity, which only exacerbated my sense of not belonging anywhere.” In choosing a title for her first feature film Dabis used the Arabic word for America. “’Amreeka’ was my way of finding a title for a movie that’s about the melding of two cultures…”
"Amreeka" made its world premiere at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and at the Cannes Film Festival. The film will open in NY and LA in early September.
The OPC is privileged to offer a screening on Monday, August 17 at 8:30 p.m. at the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65 Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues) in the Lincoln Center area. Director Cherien Dabis will do a Q&A following the screening.
Reservations are essential. Please call the OPC office at 212-626-9220 or e-mail sonya@opcofamerica.org .