It's why I fell in love with movies. You can sit in a movie theater and be transported to a place that you never get to go and be a person who you never in your life would get to be and feel something and have empathy for people and see things from another point of view.
Cherien DabisI'm always looking for ways to explore the politics of the everyday. For me, the proverbs were a way of bringing in this ancient wisdom that in Arabic culture is often quoted. Those proverbs are such a huge part of the language and parts of people's every day. This is the wisdom that we use in our everyday life but we're not always listening to.
Cherien DabisI definitely did not play myself. As the writer of the script, I have traits of all the characters. I can relate to all of the characters.
Cherien DabisJordan is many different things and there's many different parts of it. We don't ever really get to see a modern Arab city, a part of the Arab world where people are seemingly living their lives like everywhere else and also just a part of the Arab world that's surprisingly Americanized, with fast-food joints everywhere and shopping malls. Over the 30 years I've been traveling there, I really saw it grow and become modernized and much more Americanized in a way that surprised me as an Arab-American.
Cherien DabisI was really inspired by my own experience, and specifically my own identity crisis but larger than that, I also wanted to explore the trend of reverse immigration, of the immigrant returning home after being in a host country or an adopted home for 20 years, and finding themselves at various levels of discord with the home culture. I wanted to explore people building lives across multiple geographies. I think that's, something that we're experiencing more and more as travel becomes easier, as people are traveling more for work. People can work from anywhere.
Cherien Dabis