At the most basic level, Amreeka is an immigrant tale. It centers on Muna Farah and her teenaged son Fadi as they come to the U.S. from the West Bank. Muna is middle-aged, middle-class, and comes to middle America. She originally applied for a green card when she was married. Now years later, after her husband has left her for a younger, thinner woman, it has been approved. At first she is uncertain about coming to America, but as she considers the ongoing situation in the Palestinian Territories—checkpoints, the security fence—and the opportunities for her son, she decides to join her sister in Illinois. She arrives just as the Iraq War begins.

Written and directed by Cherien Dabis, whose Syrian and Palestinian parents came to the U.S. just before she was born, Amreeka reflects the sense of living in two worlds—the cultural world you bring with you and the foreign culture in which you find yourself. For Muna the tension of these two worlds is severe. She has two degrees, is fluent in three languages, and has ten years experience in banking, but the only job she can find here is slinging burgers at White Castle—a job that Muna is ashamed of.

That sense of being part of society—but not quite—permeates the film. When Muna and Fadi debate the prospect of coming to America, she says "We'll be like visitors." He replies, "Better than being prisoners in our own country." Muna's sister Raghda constantly bemoans life in America in spite of the good life they have. She savors the smells of home in Muna's suitcase when she arrives. She will always consider Palestine to be her home. Her daughters, on the other hand, are thoroughly American. But as Raghda tells her daughter, "As long as you live in this house, you live in Palestine."

Muna's experience is not unlike what various other groups—Irish, Poles, Italian, Vietnamese—faced when they immigrated. Who they may have been in their homeland didn't follow them. Here they start almost from scratch. The values and traditions of their past—or even the basic foods they have always eaten—aren't a part of their new world. They struggle, especially the first generation, to hold on to their way of life.

The film also reflects additional stresses faced by Arabs coming to the United States in the twenty-first century. Muna and Fadi face animosity, abuse and prejudice. They get death threats. They are treated with suspicion. They are called Saddam. Muna's brother-in-law, a doctor, is losing patients just because he is an Arab. Few people bother to try to understand the difference between Palestinian and Iraqi—or consider that only a small percentage of Palestinians are involved in violence against the forty-year occupation by Israeli forces.

This aspect of the film also reflects an important part of the immigrant experience—the way each new group faces rejection. We may like to think of our culture as a great melting pot, but in fact we have never been that accepting of new people coming in search of the American Dream. The fears that have arisen since 9/11 have exacerbated our reactions to immigrants, but the response is by no means a new phenomenon.

The key question the film raises is what it means to be "at home" in an alien environment. Even in Palestine, Muna and Fadi were not really at home, as Fadi noted being prisoners in their own country. Even after many years, Raghda still doesn't feel at home in America. That sense of alienation isn't necessarily limited to the immigrant experience. Having a sense of who we are and where we belong is central to each person. The problem is more pronounced when one is in a strange setting, but in an eve- changing world we often find ourselves facing new, challenging situations that may leave us feeling as though we are sojourning in a strange land. It is this that allows Amreeka to connect with the audience—and it connects very well.