AmreekaA divorced (non-Muslim) Palestinian woman with a green card, Muna (Nisreen Faour) and her teenage son, Fadi (Melka Muallem) travel to America - Amreeka, in Arabic - to join her sister in Illinois just as the U.S. invasion of Iraq gets underway.
Her dreams of a more secure and optimistic future for her son collide with some of the assumptions about them that they encounter, but the performances in Dabis' film - the Jordanian-born director grew up in rural Ohio, where her father worked as a doctor - elevate this gently observed and warm-hearted drama beyond cliché. The wonderful Hiam Abbas (The Lemon Tree) co-stars.
"The America which Muna and Fadi encounter is a complicated place - a land of racial profiling and provincialism, yes, but also of goodness and generosity. This small film...has a special poignancy" Screen Daily
