Amreeka

Amreeka (2009)

Life's best adventures are journeys of the heart.

Eager to provide a better future for her son, Fadi, divorcée Muna Farah leaves her Palestinian homeland and takes up residence in rural Illinois -- just in time to encounter the domestic repercussions of America's disastrous war in Iraq. Now, the duo must reinvent their lives with some help from Muna's sister, Raghda, and brother-in-law, Nabeel.

Date of release
2009-06-17
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (64)
Runtime
1h 36m
Genres
Drama
Director
Cherien Dabis

Casting

Interesting facts

Amreeka is a 2009 independent film written and directed by first-time director Cherien Dabis. It stars Nisreen Faour, Melkar Muallem, Hiam Abbass, Alia Shawkat, Yussuf Abu-Warda, Joseph Ziegler, and Miriam Smith.

Production

Dabis began working on the screenplay for Amreeka while a graduate student in film at Columbia University School of the Arts in 2003. Christina Piovesan, a producer in Toronto, read about Dabis in Filmmaker Magazine, thus leading the two of them to collaborate on '"Amreeka." Over the next three years, Piovesan gathered financing from a number of sources in the Middle East and Canada.

Dabis also traveled for months to hold casting auditions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dearborn, Toronto, Winnipeg, Paris, Amman, Beirut, Haifa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ramallah. In choosing Nisreen Faour for the lead role of Muna, Dabis commented that she "had a sweetness about her ... a kindness and a childlike sense of wonder.

On the choice of Melkar Muallem as Fadi, Dabis commented that he was, "the son of a Palestinian woman who helped cast the film. He wanted nothing to do with acting—both parents are actors, and he's only interested in computer science. I begged him to audition, and after he did, he wanted the part." Muallem is from Ramallah, one of the locations for the film.

Dabis modeled the family after her own, making them Christian Palestinians. Events surrounding the inclusion of a kind high school principal were taken from Dabis' own life. While in high school, serious accusations were leveled at her sister, who was saved by the intervention of the school principal. Dabis chose to make her fictional version of this principal, Mr.

The scenes in the West Bank were shot on location in Ramallah while the portion of the film set in Illinois was shot in Winnipeg. Dabis states that she chose to work in Canada rather than the United States because of "the tax incentives combined with the fact that Manitoba offered us provincial equity for shooting the film there.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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