Amreeka
| Amreeka | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Cherien Dabis |
| Produced by | Christina Piovesan Paul Barkin Zain Al Sabah |
| Written by | Cherien Dabis |
| Starring |
Nisreen Faour Melkar Muallem Hiam Abbass Alia Shawkat Yussuf Abu-Warda Joseph Ziegler Miriam Smith |
| Music by | Doug Bernheim |
| Edited by | Keith Reamer |
| Distributed by |
National Geographic Entertainment Imagenation |
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Release date
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Running time
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96 minutes |
| Country | United States Canada Kuwait |
| Language | English Arabic |
| Box office | $2,147,715 |
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.
Amreeka documents the lives of a Palestinian American family in both the West Bank and Post-9/11 suburban Chicago. It premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and opened to critical praise at a number of other important venues.National Geographic Entertainment bought all theatrical and home entertainment rights to Amreeka after its debut at Sundance.
Muna Farah (Nisreen Faour) is a divorced Palestinian Christian mother raising her teenage son Fadi (Melkar Muallem). She works for a bank in Ramallah, part of the West Bank, Palestinian territories. Each day after work, Muna picks up Fadi from school and crosses through an Israeli checkpoint in order to get to their home in Bethlehem. She lives with her aging mother and has occasional visits from her brother Samer. One day after arriving home, Muna discovers that she has been awarded an American green card through the lottery. Although she initially considered declining the offer, Muna reconsiders after she and Fadi are harassed at the checkpoint by Israeli soldiers.
They arrive in the United States shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to stay with her sister’s family in Illinois. After a difficult time with customs, Muna is reunited with her sister, Raghda Halaby (Hiam Abbass), physician brother-in-law Nabeel (Yussuf Abu-Warda) and their three children Salma (Alia Shawkat), Rana (Jenna Kawar), and Lamis (Selena Haddad). Later, however, Muna discovers that a box of cookies was confiscated during the customs search and is horrified: the box contained all of her life savings. Muna thus searches for work, but is disappointed to discover that her multiple degrees and work experience do not guarantee the kind of employment she is seeking. She finally takes a job at White Castle. Too ashamed to tell her family the truth, she pretends to have been hired by the bank next door to White Castle. She maintains the facade through the help of an employee of the bank next door to White Castle (Miriam Smith) and her blue-haired high school drop-out co-worker, Matt (Brodie Sanderson).
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