Time for Middle East movies to shine

To say that Sundance 2009 has drawn heavily on films from or about the Middle East would be an overstatement. However, the movies that do fit into these categories are welcome additions to the programme, with perspectives that go far beyond the usual clichés about the region and its people.

Amreeka (America in Arabic), directed by Cherien Dabis, is a look at one Arab-American experience, that of a Palestinian mother who leaves Bethlehem with her teenaged son when the everyday ordeal of crossing checkpoints becomes unendurable.

Muna relocates with her son Fahti to a small town where her brother-in-law works as a doctor. At the local high school, he is subject to ridicule by other kids over his name, and attacked by bullies who blame him, a Christian Palestinian, for the September 11 attacks and the Iraq war. If that weren’t humiliating enough, his mother, who had worked at a bank in the Palestinian Territories, lies to her family about working at a White Castle hamburger stand. Muna is also still struggling to learn English. “Occupation?” one official asks her. “Yes, we are occupied,” she responds. Cherien Dabis, who trained in film at Columbia University, was born in Jordan to a Palestinian mother and a Jordanian father. As in the film, her father was a doctor, a small-town paediatrician in western Ohio.

“All the Arabs there were doctors, like my father. We knew all the Arabs within a 100-mile radius of where we lived. It was pretty lonely, pretty isolated,” she says. “During the first Gulf war, there was a big shift. My dad was a local hero who saved lives, and we suddenly became the ‘Saddam-loving’ enemy overnight. We got death threats on a daily basis.”

Another group of outcasts is the subject of The Glass House, a documentary by Hamid Rahmanian about a refuge for troubled young women and girls in Tehran. Rahmanian, an Iranian living in the US, spent 18 months with the girls, many of whom are drug addicts. All of the girls either fled troubled families or were thrown out on the streets with no means of support. “No one runs away from happiness,” says one counsellor.

The shelter, Omid-e-Mehr, was founded by Marjaneh Halati, an Iranian who studied psychotherapy in London, where she now spends most of her time. The Glass House shows that the rehabilitation is working for at least some of its residents. However, with room for only 35 young women, the centre is just scratching the surface.

Also on view is the American documentary Sergio. Based on the book Chasing the Flame by the Harvard professor Samantha Power, it follows the career of the Brazilian UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in the August 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad.

Another film dealing with the Iraq war is The Road to Fallujah: One Man’s Journey into the Heart of War. Made by Mark Manning, a former oil-rig diver turned filmmaker, the American shot his documentary while delivering humanitarian aid by lorry after the 2004 US siege of the city.

The film assesses the impact of this action. The director stresses that he was not embedded with US troops, and sees his film as a critique of the embed process. The Road to Fallujah is playing at the Slamdance Festival, an alternative event during Sundance that is now marking its 15th anniversary.

* David D’Arcy