Issue date: 11/10/09 Section: Film & Music

Amreeka's cast brings the film to life Photo: National Geographic Entertainment

This is not the familiar West Bank that is so often portrayed on the news. There are no suicide bombers or wounded children. No mobs of angry Arabs toting AK-47s. Not everyone is Muslim.

Instead, Amreeka ('America' in Arabic) brings us everyday West Bank - the long lines at checkpoints, the weariness of a two-hour trip home that in another time (before the wall) took only fifteen minutes. It brings us a grandmother who sends her daughter to a new life in America with cucumbers and a boy who yearns to escape his home for a place where he can have an education, a future. "It's better than being prisoners in our own country," he says.

The film follows a single mother, Muna (Nisreen Faour), and her sixteen-year-old son, Fadi (Melkar Muallem), from mountainous sandy Bethlehem to rainy small-town Illinois where they reunite with Muna's sister and her family. They begin the trials of surviving in an America at war with Iraq, where no one can tell one Arab from another and where too many people believe they are terrorists.

The story is inspired by writer-director Cherien Dabis' own life. Dabis grew up in rural Ohio during the first Gulf War where racism was rife and death threats were not unknown.

Dabis' debut feature Amreeka, winner of the 2009 FIPRESCI Prize, is real and refreshingly funny. It doesn't patronize us by delivering a formulaic plot with fairytale endings trussed with ribbons. Instead, it shows us the pain of not being able to call your home a home. Its only failing may be a hint of heavy-handedness. In one scene, domestic life in Illinois mirrors the walls the Israelis built. One of Muna's nieces lays down a line of forbidding green tape in the bedroom she shares with her younger sister, making her sister a prisoner in her own room.

The cast of Amreeka is charming and restrained. Faour as Muna is dazzling. She may not have a 1000-watt smile, but her dimpled smile is like a warm fire. She is Muna, and Muna is a real mother, one who gives her son triple kisses on the cheek in front of the principal and sacrifices a life of relative comfort in the West Bank for the humiliation of working at White Castle, a fast food joint, in the US. We root for her. She takes us in, and ultimately makes the film a success.

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