Muna (Nisreen Faour, r) deals with White Castle customers and anti-Arab sentiment in Cherien Davis’s Amreeka
Milk and honey are in short supply when a Palestinian woman and her teenage son arrive in America in this modest but effective indie drama. While Amreeka may offer only minor variations on the familiar story of immigrants struggling to cope with culture clashes and with their own rapidly diminishing expectations, Cherien Davis’s debut feature is bolstered by strong, nuanced performances by her cast and its ability to convey the sense of precariousness felt by so many Arab-Americans in the wake of 9/11, regardless of how long they’d made their home in the U.S..
A middle-aged bank manager, Muna (Nisreen Faour), is exhausted by the difficult task of maintaining some semblance of a normal life in the West Bank. Concerned about what kind of future she can expect for her son Fadi (Melkar Muallem), she decides to pull up stakes and head for suburban Illinois (the movie’s actually shot in Winnipeg, but close enough).
The two move in with the family of Muna’s sister Raghda (the excellent French-Palestinian actor Hiam Abbass). While Fadi’s cousin Salma (Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat) introduces him to the many unwholesome habits of American teens, Muna discovers that the only place that will hire her is White Castle, the fast-food chain that has become a hardy symbol of all-American trashiness. (To be fair, Muna nearly manages to get falafel added to the menu.)
Concealing her job from the rest of her family, Muna tries to make the best of it, but local anti-Arab sentiment due to the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq creates troubles for the whole clan.
Davis can’t entirely resist the temptation to make some larger political points, but Amreeka works best as a smaller-scale portrait of characters who may feel as culturally and economically marginalized in North America as they did in the Middle East. Muna’s dogged refusal to stay at those margins makes her an unlikely but very welcome kind of heroine in a movie that mostly eschews easy uplift or easy solutions.
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