Screenplay: Cherien Dabis
Cinematographer: Tobias Datum
Editing: Keith Reamer
Sound: Brock Capell
Art Director: Aidan Leroux
Music: Kareen Roustom
Casting: Nisreen Faour, Melkar Muallem, Hiam Abbass, Yuyussuf Abu-Warda, Alia Shawkat, Joseph Ziegler
Production: First Generation Films, Alcina Pictures
Distribution:
Memento films Distribution
9 cité Paradis
75010 Paris
France
Tel: 0033 1 53 34 90 20
Fax: 0033 1 42 47 11 24
Mail: [email protected]
www.memento-films.com
Year: 2009
35 mm, Color, 96 min, OV Arabian and English with French subtitles
Directors' Fortnight Cannes 2009
Mouna is a Palestinian Christian divorced mother with an adolescent son, a woman full of enthusiasm and optimism. Yet daily life is hard in the middle of the occupied territories and future seems gloomy. One day it becomes possible to leave such life and go to USA to work: Mouna who feels a stranger in her own country can well become a stranger abroad. She leaves with her son Faji to join her sister who settled in a remote place in Illinois fifteen years ago. After the warmth of the reunion, Mouna and Fadi must find their own place in this “Amerrika” they had dreamt of so much. However, the United States are fighting a war against ‘evil’ Saddam Hussein and have a strange conception of hospitality. But this is not enough to stop Mouna in her quest for a better life…
To be in the minority within one’s occupied country, in the minority within a host country: to feel one belongs neither to the East, nor to the West.
