AmericanEast

AmericanEast (2008)

Summer in L.A., it's hot. Homeland Security has set the threat level at red; they're searching for several Arabs alleged to be terrorists. Mustafa, an Egyptian immigrant who runs a falafel shop, comes to the FBI's attention; they investigate him. He has other problems: his young teen son no longer wants to be a Muslim; his sister, a nurse, objects to Mustafa arranging her marriage to a cousin from Egypt. She has a non-Arab suitor of her own. Omar, an employee of Mustafa, is a struggling actor who doesn't want to play only terrorists. Mustafa hopes to open a real restaurant and has a potential partner in Sam, a Jew, whose family objects. What is the price of the American dream?

Date of release
2008-11-14
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (9)
Runtime
1h 52m
Genres
Drama, Romance
Director
Hesham Issawi

Casting

Interesting facts

AmericanEast is a 2008 American drama film about Arab-Americans living in Los Angeles after the September 11 attacks. The story examines long-held misunderstandings about Arabic and Islamic culture by focusing on the points-of-view of three main characters.

Background

In March 2003, writer-director Hesham Issawi and actor-writer Sayed Badreya, both Egyptian-born and living in Los Angeles, met with actor Tony Shalhoub, then in his second season of Monk. The two young filmmakers wanted the veteran actor to commit to a short film idea they wished to shoot.

The concept for the short film, written by Issawi and writer Dick Grunert, was very close to Sayed Badreya's real-life conundrum as an Arab-American actor struggling to find roles in the U.S. – he was always cast as a terrorist.

When the short did well on the festival circuit, winning Best Short Film awards at the Boston International Film Festival and the San Francisco World Film Festival, the three determined to expand upon the idea of T for Terrorist to develop a bigger project that would represent more characters from the Arab-American community who they felt were constantly being stereotyped by Hollywood.

In 2005, once a feature-length script was in hand, Shalhoub began looking for a producer and production company. Through a mutual friend, he approached producer Brian Cox at Distant Horizon, an international film financing company headed by Anant Singh and known for taking a stand on political and social issues in films such as the Oscar-nominated Yesterday. Cox read the script and immediately saw the relevance and timeliness of the project.

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

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