Opening today at the Harvard Exit, the immigrant drama Amreeka (review) isn’t autobiographical, but it certainly draws upon the experiences of its Arab-American writer/director, Cherien Dabis, as she explained while visiting for SIFF this June. Born in Ohio, she later shuttled back and forth to Jordan and the West Bank, where she has family members, but was educated in the U.S.How difficult, or different, was the back-and-forth assimilation back then in the ’80s? “Back then, the airport situation was okay for us,” Dabis recalls of the pre-9/11 era. “The only thing that stands out to me was traveling to the West Bank. That really hasn’t changed. If anything it’s gotten worse.”As a schoolgirl in Ohio, she continues, “People didn’t know anything about the Middle East. There weren’t images in the news, the way you see Baghdad now. The stereotype of the Arab as terrorist really emerged during that period as well. I don’t know if grew out the Iranian hostage crisis. It started to solidify during the first intifada as well. I think suicide bombings didn’t happen until the second intifada.”It often fell to Dabis to educate her schoolmates about what they saw on CNN. Or, returning to visit relatives in Jordan, she had to explain that the U.S. wasn’t the same land of sin and violence they saw in our movies. She found herself “explaining to both sides. I felt very much like a bridge growing up. I always had to explain the American side of me to the Arab relatives, and I had to explain the Arab side of me to the Americans. I wasn’t American enough for the Americans or Arab enough for the Arabs.”In part, that’s the dilemma felt by the teenage son of her film’s protagonist, Muna (Nisreen Faour), as he navigates American high school. Meanwhile his mother goes through the culture shock of being an immigrant in a country where she suddenly has less status and few job contacts, where racism and ethnic stereotyping may be cruelly felt.That’s no different than it was for the Jews or Irish or Chinese immigrants before, says Dabis: “In a lot of ways, it’s quite similar. An immigrant of any background can relate to it. But because of what’s happening right now, politically speaking, an immigrant from an Arab background could experience a little bit more of a sense of isolation and discrimination.”Yet whatever hardship her heroine may suffer, Dabis sees Muna’s story as being fundamentally optimistic. “I definitely don’t think it’s every immigrant’s experience. I definitely know there are people full of hope and optimism, the way that this character is. And those are the sort of people I wanted to represent. Because I think it’s a really endearing quality. I wanted to give the film a lightness through the point of view of [Muna].”Moreover, as a stern critic of the old Bush administration, Dabis feels the new Obama era has changed the immigration dynamic for Arabs on both sides of the Atlantic.”I feel like the impressions of the U.S. in the Arab world have changed dramatically,” she says. “There’s such a desperation in some parts of Palestine that they still want out. But leaving isn’t necessarily the answer. What people really want is for the U.S. to help broker the situation there. To help end the occupation, to help end the building of settlements. To make life more bearable for Palestinians. I think that with Obama, people are thinking less about emigration.”