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Cherien Dabis talks family, filmmaking and Amreeka

Written by Catherine Kustanczy Tuesday, 27 October 2009 10:34

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Cherien Dabis talks family, filmmaking and Amreeka
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“Everyone can relate to feeling like an outsider,” says director Cherien Dabis via telephone one rainy afternoon. “Everyone can relate to wanting to fit in. We all have felt like we didn’t.”
Speaking about her feature film debut, Amreeka, the American-born filmmaker, who has an impressive list of writing and directing credits, says the universality of the outsider story speaks to “the core of who we are and what we need. We have a need to fit in, to have a community or feel like we have a sense of community. We all need to feel loved.”

Amreeka, which opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on October 30th, examines what it’s like to be an outsider by exploring the challenges faced by new immigrants Muna and her son Fadi as they move from the West Bank to Middle America. Moving from the humiliation of checkpoints to the humiliation of working at White Castle, as Muna does, or being the brunt of racist jokes at school, as is Fadi’s experience, the film is a loving, touching tribute to family, and to the bonds that keep people together through adversity.

The film won the Directors’ Fortnight FIPRESCI/Critic’s Prize at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, and was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. In North America, the film has received positive notices from both the Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Weekly. Not bad for a first feature.

Dabis’ earlier work was a short entitled Make A Wish (2007), which received international acclaim when it made a splash at several important worldwide film festivals two years ago. The influential trade publication Variety named Cherien Dabis as “one of the ten directors to watch” this year, and she’s already in the midst of planning her second feature film. The daughter of immigrant parents has, by all accounts, done very well for herself indeed. She freely admits that the story for Amreeka was mainly inspired by the trials and tribulations endured by own family who emigrated from the West Bank to a small town in Illinois.

Like the frustrated immigrant father of the piece (Muna’s brother-in-law), Dabis’ father was a physician. During the first Gulf War, he and the family suffered the effects of racism, as they were sent pieces of hate mail and Dr. Dabis lost numerous patients. These events are echoed in the film, as Muna, her sister and her family struggle with being one of the only Arab families in the largely white, Mid-Western town during the advent of the second Gulf War. Sometimes, the director says, life is stranger and more disturbing than art. “Things got much more absurd than in the movie,” she recalls. “At one point the Secret Service showed up at my high school, because there was a phony claim made that my sister had threatened to kill the President. I was 14 at the time. It was a very … life-changing movement. I became aware of the media and the stereotypes that the media perpetuates. They had a direct impact on us.”

Dabis identified and quickly felt the effects of those stereotypes early on, coming from an immigrant Arab family who were trying to make a go of it in small-town America. While she tried to balance the desire to fit in with cherishing her own cultural background, she saw how being an outsider informed and shaped her worldview –not just in her own life, but in her approach to her art. Her works are filled with characters trying to fit in while not fading out. “Whether you’re a new or old immigrant, or not even considered to be an immigrant, everyone can relate to feeling like an outsider,” she says, “it’s all intertwined.”

Yet even before her characters leave their homeland, there is a sense of them being outsiders. Amreeka opens with a fascinating collection of scenes portraying the daily lives of Muna and Fadi, with every miniscule, bureaucratic detail in place. The threat of violence hangs the air. With minimal dialogue and effective sound editing that nicely captures the rough world of Ramallah, the flight of Muna and Fadi to America is rendered clearly and with an unblinking realism.

There is no romanticism in their flight or extraneous scenes of drama drawing out their reasons for leaving. With simple, elegant economy, Dabis conveys the heavy, weary sense of daily existence in Ramallah, and occasionally refers back to it through simple scenes of Muna and her brother-in-law talking about the Iraq war, which Dabis has used as a political backdrop to the events in Amreeka.

Logistics for filming were another matter. Dabis had shot in the West Bank before, but with the scale of Amreeka she faced greater challenges in securing rights and security. “We aligned ourselves with the right people,” she says triumphantly. The crew secured permission of the Palestinian Authority, and she worked with what she terms “a fantastic production crew” who knew how to navigate the terrain. “The most complicated part of shooting there is the logistics. It can be done, but you really have to know what to do and what not to do, and what to take care of.”
This process wasn’t always intuitive, she notes. For instance, bringing in equipment from Canada and having it go through Israel into the West Bank required the involvement of Israeli customs and a raft of their own transportation requirements, and subsequently the involvement of the Palestinian Authority and abiding by their respective requirements.
“That’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t think about anywhere else,” she says, “you’d take it for granted, that level of detail that you would have to do. It’s a combination of preparedness and luck, because you never know when you’re over there…” The checkpoints portrayed in the film weren’t, obviously, real ones, but Dabis used her own experience there. “I have the benefit of having been through many of them,” she notes dryly.