Cherien Dabis’ debut feature film, Amreeka, is a palatable, sweet film about a Palestinian mother and son coming to America. It feels like a pilot episode of a serial TV show, which is really unusual for this kind of subject matter. It’s a strength and a weakness for the story- perhaps if there really were a prime time episodic show that humanized the Palestinian experience and rendered it so familiar there would be a sorely needed and perceptible pressure against the prevailing myth of extremist Arabs and terrorism. On the other hand, the film suffers from a lack of intensity and from an understandable but problematic anti-political stance. The most politicized character in the film is the doctor brother-in-law with a diminishing medical practice in the suburbs of Chicago due to post 9/11 reactionism, and he is shut down by the main character, Muna, the mom (played by the charismatic Nisreen Faour), who insists that the political troubles of Palestine and Israel have little bearing on the reality here in the US. This is a common stance for immigrants of many backgrounds, who hone in on the material struggle for survival in their new country and cannot afford to give much energy or resources to their homeland’s strife. Yet it is also one of the main reasons why immigrant communities become, over generations, minority populations with little political power and or representation. I have often lamented this fact often about the Chinese American communities, and although it is less true amongst the youth, I have found it to be quite true in first generation Palestinian immigrants.
