Coming to Amreeka: in her feature film debut, Cherien Dabis explores a Palestinian family's trials in small-town USA--and revisits her own upbringing in the process.

AMREEKA IS A FUNNY AND SWEET FILM, but it is also an immigrant's tale, one filled with small betrayals that slowly accumulate and weigh heavily on its subjects. In the film, the first feature from Cherien Dabis, a Palestinian single mother, Muna Farah, and her 16-year-old son, Fadi, emigrate to the United States in 2003 during the second American invasion of Iraq. Here, the American dream eludes them: Muna feels lucky to get a job at a White Castle in a suburban Illinois community, even though she worked at a bank in Ramallah. Fadi is arrested and accused of making terrorist threats after facing down a group of thugs at school who were harassing his mother.

Dabis, 32, once lived through her own version of Amreeka, the Arabic word for "America." As a girl, she prayed that she'd "wake up with blue eyes and blond hair"-anything to fit into small-town life in Celina, Ohio, where her Palestinian-born father had a thriving pediatrics practice. Dabis didn't look particularly Middle Eastern. Her Jordanian mother wasn't veiled, and the family was Christian. But in Celina they were dramatically foreign to their neighbors, who were predominantly German and Lutheran.

Even so, her father was once something of a town hero. "I was always hearing things like 'Your dad saved so-and-so's life,'" Dabis says. That all changed in 1991 with the start of Operation Desert Storm. Her father abandoned his practice after patients stopped coming. Death threats filled the family mailbox, and the local newspaper even published letters from people suggesting "those Arabs leave town."

The turmoil went from unbearable to ludicrous, Dabis says. when the Secret Service arrived at Dabis's high school when she was 14 years old to investigate a rumor that her 17-year-old sister, Faten, had threatened to kill the president. By then, "I had awakened to the polities of the situation," she says. "I felt like a bridge growingup: I wasn't American enough for the Americans, I wasn't Arab enough for the Arabs. I was always having to explain to the other side who the other people were. Being caught between two worlds was very much my story."

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Dabis initially committed to changing the world through public policy and the media. She worked in public relations in Washington, D.C., during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but left feeling "there is no room for truth in politics," she says. "I realized that the only way I would be able to say what I wanted to say was through fiction--maybe then people would let their guard down and listen."

Two days before the September 11 attacks, Dabis moved to New York City to begin film school at Columbia University. She witnessed yet another surge in Middle Eastern stereotypes, but this time, something was different. "There was a real movement within the Arab-American community of people investing in media, personally, financially, and really understanding that we need to tell our stories," Dabis says. Amreeka is one such result.

Dabis wrote the screenplay for the film while at Columbia and submitted it to Ilene Chaiken, the creator of Showtime's hit lesbian soap opera, The L Word. After graduating, Dabis wrote for Chaiken's show. Also on The L Word, she worked with director Rose Troche, who was her romantic partner for a time.

The two are no longer a couple, and Dabis doesn't identify as gay or straight or along the lines of sexual orientation at all. But she is far from classically closeted. She finds her pride and sense of urgency around "being Arab, and particularly around being Palestinian-American. Some people do fit within a [sexual orientation] label and are comfortable using [one]," she says, "but I don't want to feel forced to have to use a label."

These days Dabis is cautiously optimistic about the film and Palestinians. "Since age 14, I have been obsessed with the way the media was perpetuating stereotypes that were directly affecting my family," she says. "But recently there was a 60 Minutes special on what it was to be Palestinian in the West Bank--that was just hugely shocking to me. There has been a shift." Toward the end of Amreeka, Fadi, defeated and bitter after his arrest, insists that he and his mother don't belong in America. Muna replies, "If we don't belong here, then where do we belong? We have every right to be here, just like anyone else."

"The important thing," Muna concludes, boring into her son's eyes the way only a mother can, "is that you can't let anyone make you question who you are."

In helping Muna articulate the American dream, Dabis finally saw the potential of her own dreams. "When I started film school I did two things," she says. "I started therapy and I made a conscious effort that whatever I lacked in talent I would make up for with hard work. So I really worked my ass off in film school, and I applied for everything." Dabis pauses to consider all that has happened-and the scholarships and prizes she's won-since she decided to make films, then says, "Hard work really paid off, actually."