On DVD: AMERICAN ARAB

New to DVD this week: AMERICAN ARAB

Usama Alshaibi’s personal exploration of Arab-American identity had its world premiere at IDFA in 2013. It went on to screen at Big Sky, Chicago Underground, Cleveland, Stockholm, Revelation, Kansas City, and the San Francisco Arab Film Festival, among others.

Alshaibi, an Iraqi-born, US-based filmmaker, takes a largely autobiographical approach in this examination of the experiences of Arabs and Arab Americans in a post-9/11 American society. Narrating and sharing his life experiences, and those of his family, the director expresses an ever-present awareness of the difficult tightrope he, and others with a similar ethnic background, have been forced to walk, contending with Islamophobia both blatant and more insidious, conflicted feelings about assimilation vs tradition, and a shifting sense of identity influenced by complex geopolitical developments. While he surveys the stories of others, from a woman who had her hijab forcefully snatched from her head to a young Iraqi immigrant whose father was victimized by both insurgents and US armed forces, these are too slight and episodic to fully breathe, with the default focus returning to Alshaibi’s personal biography to diminishing returns for the project’s too brief running time. While the film is not wholly successful, it does pose provocative, worthwhile questions that would benefit from more extended consideration.