On the responsibility of being a storyteller

What did your experience of filmmaking at Columbia University give you in terms of technical skills, but perhaps also the confidence or theories around filmmaking, for better or worse?

I went to Columbia knowing very little about the film industry and film in general. I grew up with immigrant parents who had a huge library of old Egyptian movies, so I had a love for film, and I had stories that I was really, really burning to tell, particularly because of what I had experienced as a kid growing up in a small town in northwestern Ohio.

I really got the chance to learn the craft, the writing, and directing. I mean, I didn’t even really know what a director did going into film school. I’d taken a photography class in high school, but I had very limited knowledge. I came in knowing I was a storyteller and that I had stories that I wanted to tell, and everything else I learned while I was there.

Your first short film Make A Wish won awards, and it screened at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in 2007. Tell me about that film and how it reflected where you were in your own life at that time.

I was the first in my family born in the US. My parents immigrated right before I was born, but I grew up going back to the Arab world a lot as a kid, and I grew up going to Palestine, and I had a relationship with Palestine kind of through my father, and I had all of these experiences going there and visiting.

I was in film school, I was in my mid-20s, and I realized I hadn’t been to Palestine in a very long time. It [had been] over a decade since I had been there, and I really wanted to go back and do something. And I wanted to form my own relationship with the place. I didn’t want my relationship with Palestine to only exist through my father.

I had been in film school exploring story, but in some ways, I wasn’t exploring storytelling in Palestine. I was exploring storytelling as a Palestinian living in the diaspora. My dad is a Palestinian refugee who lived most of his life in exile, and so therefore I didn’t really know what it’s like to live under occupation. I only have these windows into that experience through my visits, and sometimes we have longer visits, and so I got these kind of more in-depth points of view into what life was like there, but I certainly did not grow up there.

So I always felt like, well, what right do I have to tell a story that takes place there? Finally, I graduated from film school and I just made a decision. I was like, “All right, this is who I am, and I have to go back to Palestine, and I have to tell a story there.” I came up with a story. I kept thinking to myself, “What story can I tell as someone that did not grow up there?” “What story do I feel I have the right to tell?”

And it came to me one day, the story that I wanted to tell. And it was a very simple story about a girl who really wants to buy a birthday cake, and we don’t know what the cake is for, but we just know that she will stop at nothing to get this cake. It has to be a particular cake, it’s the most expensive one at the bakery, she doesn’t have enough money, so she’s got to go out and try to find the money. And through that story of this girl trying to get this cake, I wanted to kind of just show in this simple way, a day in the life of a Palestinian child.

And so I wrote this script, and it was quite simple. The whole thing takes place really in one day, just in a couple of hours. And I went to Palestine for the first time in years and years, and spent a few months there immersing myself, so that I could feel that I really could tell the story authentically. And I met so many amazing people, really reconnected with the place, built my own film community. I mean, in many ways I brought a cinematographer with me from Los Angeles, and we ended up training some crew for certain roles like technical roles, like a focus puller and things like that, a script supervisor. So it was kind of this really amazing, amazing experience where I got to be a part of a burgeoning film industry in Palestine, because it was all relatively new back then.

It was such a beautiful personal journey for me to go back after so many years and tell a story in Palestine, and make a film there with a community where we were all just looking for each other and trying to find out how to do this thing together. And it was really quite life-changing actually. I connected deeply with Palestine, and I’ve had a great relationship with just the community, the film community there, and have made really amazing friends who I’ve gotten to work with over the years through my first feature, and up until now.

In 2009, your first full length movie debuted at Sundance, and I’m hoping you can tell me about that movie, and perhaps what you took from your first film into the process of the second? Well, of your first full length.

Well, shooting in Palestine, shooting in occupied territory that is full of checkpoints, and incredible logistical challenges, it’s very, very tricky. And so shooting my short film, Make A Wish there was incredibly informative and educational, and I learned so much. I mean, there are things that we were able to do because we were a short film with a very, very light footprint. Back then, we shot the film in 2005, it was still mini-DV back then. But I learned a lot. We really faced a lot of difficulties on that short.

So Amreeka, we only shot the first 20 minutes of that film in Palestine. The story is an immigrant single mom who leaves Palestine with her teenage son to start a new life in the US, in rural Illinois where she has a sister, and she goes to stay with them, and kind of ends up having to face some of the racism of the American Midwest.

We shot the first part of that movie in Palestine, and I think logistically I was really prepared because of the short film. And I’d already created this community, so I had a production company for us to work with, I had some crew, I knew the lay of the land as far as like, Ramallah was where I had shot the short, and that was where we based ourselves for the feature. The short film was really a wonderful building block in so many ways. Not just for the actual making of the film, but also the short was my calling card. It was what allowed me to get financing, and for people to have confidence that I could helm a feature as a director. So one really kind of built upon the other. And yeah, Amreeka world-premiered at Sundance in 2009, and really made quite a splash. It certainly exceeded my expectations, let’s say, which was amazing.

Let me come back to Mo, which I love. I absolutely binge-watched two series just pretty much back to back to back.

Oh, that’s awesome.

It’s so good. It’s funny, it’s tragic, even though it’s his specific experience, it is so relatable in so many ways. So how did you become involved in that series, and what did you know about it before you said yes?

Well, I knew about it through Ramy and Mo, because I worked as a director on Ramy for the first two seasons. I directed six episodes of Rami Youssef’s series, Ramy, for Hulu, and so I worked with Mo as an actor, and obviously I worked with Ramy as a creator, writer and actor. And so I knew about the series, but I wasn’t sure when exactly it was going, and what stage they were in.

At some point I found out through my agent that they were casting and that I was right for a part, and I can’t remember if one of them requested me. It may have been that Mo, or Ramy, or both of them requested that I put myself on tape for it, that I audition. And so I did, because I, at that point, I think Ramy knew, I’ve been sort of looking to step away from directing television, because I really wanted to focus on my own filmmaking. At that point, I was immersing myself in writing the script for my feature that just premiered at Sundance, All That’s Left of You.

I was really open to acting in television, but directing was taking so much of my time and my energy, so I was looking to kind of step away from directing. So when I heard that a role was open and that I might be right, and then I heard it was Mo’s sister, I was like, “Oh my God, I would love to do this. It would be so much fun, I would love to work with Mo, his story is incredible.” So I put myself on tape for it and I actually got cast. So it was very formal, procedural way of going about it, but that’s the fair way that you land a role on a show like that. And it was just, for me, it was a no-brainer. The moment I heard about it, I was like, “I really want to do this.”

At a time when the news is exhausting and it can be hard to view humanity with hope, how do you find the mental and emotional energy to continue to create, to focus on what your intention is rather than how it’s received, and to make time for your personal relationships?

I think that from the time I was a kid, I’ve always just felt such a massive responsibility, growing up in the diaspora, knowing the level of privilege that I have, and having witnessed so much of the injustices firsthand up close, I’ve seen my dad humiliated at checkpoints, and at borders, and border crossings and checkpoints in Palestine.

And I think I just feel a tremendous amount of responsibility to represent. In fact, I don’t even think I’d be in this business if it wasn’t for… I chose to be a filmmaker because I wanted to tell our authentic stories. I mentioned before, I grew up in a small town in northwestern Ohio, and for the most part we were one of a handful of immigrant families in this town of like 95 percent white Americans of German descent, and we were treated as just the exotic other, nothing too crazy. Everyone was pretty friendly for the most part. I definitely felt like an outsider, but that’s it. That wasn’t a terrible experience. I just as a kid, always wanted to fit in. But then the first Gulf War hit, and I was 13 years old during the first Gulf War, and we suddenly went from people’s friends and neighbors, to being their enemy overnight.

And that was when I really woke up to the power of storytelling, and the power of the media. And when you have, I think an event like that, that’s so formative, it really became who I… I just was on a mission after that. I was like, “I have to change this.” No one else was doing it at that time. It was 1991. We were horrifically and dangerously being misrepresented right and left in film and television.

And I just became totally impassioned about doing something about it. So that keeps me going. When times are tough, I know that I have privilege and I have a responsibility, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. I feel that it’s my contribution, and it’s the very least that I could do. And it makes me feel like there’s some meaning to my life and my work.