AMREEKA
February 21, 2010 - 7:00pm Rated PG

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 

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.

 Visit: Official movie site for Amreeka.

 

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“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