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Raghda Halaby (Hiam Abbass) has lived in the United States for 15 years, but she's still homesick for the Middle East in the movie "Amreeka."
"The feeling doesn't go away. It's like a tree that's pulled out by its roots and planted somewhere else. It doesn't grow," she tells her sister, Muna Farah (Nisreen Faour), newly arrived from the West Bank.
But Muna reminds her sister she hasn't been back in years and it's not the same. A trip to work that once took 15 minutes is now two hours and two checkpoints, just part of the reason why the divorced mother and her bright teenage son, Fadi (Melkar Muallem), have come to America in 2003.
- Starring: Nisreen Faour, Hiam Abbass.
- Rating: PG-13 for brief drug use involving teens, and some language. In English and Arabic with some English subtitles.
- Web site: www.amreeka.com/html/af.html
The pair move in with Raghda, her physician-husband and their three daughters in suburban Illinois at the onset of the Iraq war, when suspicion is widespread and misplaced. The doctor is losing patients, a job interviewer jokes to Muna, "Don't blow the place up," and vandals with a spelling problem write "Al Kada" in the dirt coating a family car.
In making her feature film debut with "Amreeka," which means America in Arabic, writer-director Cherien Dabis drew inspiration from her Palestinian/Jordanian family and loosely based Muna on her aunt.
She explores the differences and similarities among natives, long-settled immigrants and newcomers, along with parents and children. When Raghda angrily reminds her eldest daughter, "As long as you live in this house, you live in Palestine," it sounds like something Dabis once heard.
Abbass has a list of notable credits in films such as "The Visitor," "The Nativity Story," "Munich" and "Paradise Now" while Palestinian actress Faour is less familiar but no less talented.
Whether taking a shine to her unlikely coworkers or defending her son against bullies, Muna is the ultimate earthy mother. Between her fuller figure and pledges to lose weight, she looks like an average woman.
Dabis piles it on just a little too thickly when it comes to misfortune for Muna and others, but she gives a new accent to the quintessential story of an immigrant who is tired, poor and yearning to be free to build a better life for herself and her son.
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