Arab Representation in Film

In this Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019 photo, Lebanese director Nadine Labaki, gives an interview to The Associated Press in Beirut, Lebanon.
( AP Photo/Bilal Hussein )

Summary Transcript

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. It's Arab American Heritage Month, a time to spotlight contributions to our community and our culture, but unfortunately, one area of culture where Arab Americans continue to be marginalized or straight-up stereotypes is in our movies and television. In 2021, the then newly formed Middle Eastern Writers Committee, a group within the Writers Guild of America West, took to Twitter to share an open letter.

The letter begins, "We form this committee primarily on the basis of one disappointing fact. As reported in the Writers Guild of America West inclusion report of 2020, Middle Eastern writers are dead last, making up only 0.3% of employed writers." You read that right, 0.3%. That's pretty close to 0%. Without representation in the writer's room, portrayals of Arab people on screen often suffer, many Arab characters in film and TV still only exist as terrorists or CIA operatives fighting terrorists, looking at you, certain TV shows on Showtime.

Often when Arab characters are explicitly included, writers don't seem to spend time getting cultural details like food or slang or accents right, but there are signs that changes are coming and progress is being made. Joining us now to discuss the landscape of Arab representation in film and to recommend some films to check out in honor of Arab American Heritage Month is Yasmina Tawil, the director of film programming at the Arab Film & Media Institute. Welcome to the studio, Yasmina.

Yasmina Tawil: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want to hear from you what do you think about current Hollywood portrayals of Arab Americans or Arab people, what would you like to change or maybe you want to recommend people watch something that's a great example of Arab representation? Our phone lines are open, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or you can reach out on social media @allofitwnyc. We're familiar with the themes around terrorism, unfortunately, but what are some other common stereotypical portrayals of Arabs and Arab Americans that we see on screen?

Yasmina Tawil: Especially when you look at older films, you see the stereotype of the rich sheikh or just the rich Saudi businessman in general who's sort of sexually [unintelligible 00:02:30] and embroiled and bad, questionable business practices, as well as the stereotype of the harem girl and the sex slave and things like this, and then also just Arab people as violent and buffoons, barbarians stuck in the past, that kind of thing. Though, especially since 9/11, terrorist is really the predominant stereotype, unfortunately.

Alison Stewart: An example from 2018 that you pointed out to us was the film Beirut. Let me read you the slug line here, "In 1980s Beirut, Mason Skiles is a former US diplomat who is called back into service to save a colleague from the group that is possibly responsible for his own family's death. Meanwhile, a CIA field agent who is working undercover at the American embassy is tasked with keeping Mason alive and ensuring that the mission is a success." Where did this film go wrong in your opinion?

Yasmina Tawil: So many places. First of all, it takes place around the Lebanese Civil War which is a real event that affected real people, my family included. To tell it through a Western or an American perspective, we're already starting off on a leery foot. Then, on top of that, even watching the trailer, you can see the accents don't make sense, the music is not Lebanese, the landscape looks way more desertous than the country of Lebanon is, the actors don't appear to be Lebanese, they make up a fake terrorist group, kind of the assumption that people were kidnapping Americans like CIA operatives or whatever.

It's just like so far from the truth and so far from how it affected the Lebanese people. That war didn't affect anyone really on American soil except for maybe some marines who were deployed there. It really affected the Lebanese people and the people in the countries around them, and it was devastating for the country. To frame it from American perspective drives me nuts.

Alison Stewart: One educator I spoke to, we did a segment similar to this, and she called the super patriot lane that it's terrorist or you're the person who is so American and so pro-America. Why doesn't this actually help the problem?

Yasmina Tawil: I think it kind of plays into the concept of model minority and the idea that an Arab person or a Middle Eastern person, or this is often really tied to Islamophobia so a Muslim person cannot be good, could not be empathized with unless they are supporting America, and that's just so far from the truth. We're all people, good and bad, and yes, I think it's really frustrating. It also supports this idea that America is the best, is the superpower, and that's it, like they are the star of the world, which is really frustrating for the rest of us.

Alison Stewart: Part of what you mentioned in that first film Beirut was the idea of maybe not the most sensitive writing, maybe they're not best-researched writing. You talked about something called the Agrabah effect, which is a reference to Disney's Aladdin. Will you explain what that is?

Yasmina Tawil: Yes, it's this thing that filmmakers do where they just make up a vaguely Arab or vaguely Middle Eastern country. It's usually dusty, sort of shown in a yellowish tinge, and stuck in the past where it's full of violence and barbarianism and misogyny, and it's very one-dimensional and untruthful. It just really does a disservice to all of us because no one will ever learn about our culture if you're just making it up.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Yasmina Tawil, director of film programming at the Arab Film & Media Institute. We're talking about portrayals of Arab and Arab Americans on screen. We'll get to some great portrayals. I just wanted to follow up with a couple of different things. There are two big movies coming out soon that deal with themes of terrorism: Kandahar, which stars Gerard Butler as a CIA operative, fleeing his translator, blowing off their cover in Afghanistan, and then there's the Guy Ritchie film starring Jake Gyllenhaal, The Covenant, which is about a translator in Afghanistan who goes to great lengths to help save the life of an American sergeant.

This sort of seems to fall under certain patterns. Then it's interesting though because as we were talking in our meeting, Afghanistan is Central Asia technically, and it's technically an Arab country. Do you find that are we leaning into Islamophobia? Are we starting to brush up against that?

Yasmina Tawil: When we talk about anti-Arab sentiment and also Arab stereotypes, it really is the lines where it's Arab stereotyping versus Middle East stereotyping versus Islamophobia. The lines all kind of get mixed up. To be honest, a lot of Americans don't know what denotes the Arab world and what denotes the Middle East and what is a Muslim country outside of either region. To be fair, some of these identifying qualifiers are not always the best way to talk about large groups of very diverse people, but it all kind of gets lumped together. They're like, "Brown from that region, probably Muslim," so the stereotype remains.

Then, in a country like Afghanistan, like all of the countries that we as America perpetrate war in, you get these negative stereotypes on the screen. It goes beyond the Middle East or the Arab world. We can look at depictions from Vietnam and stuff like that as well, but something that Jack Shaheen said, who was one of the leading scholars on Arab representation in media, is that policy informs mythical images, and mythical images inform policy, and basically, a lot of films lean on this nationalistic patriotism, which helps the government, and the government supports these images because it makes them look good.

When we're talking about Afghanistan, it just kind of all gets lumped in, and it's all positive, honestly, for the war effort.

Alison Stewart: Which is why this is important because the way people learn about-- I'm using gigantic air quotes, "learn about people is often through imagery," or they absorb imagery, and they absorb messages whether or not the filmmakers are well-meaning or not, which is why it's important to have all kinds of people involved in these projects so that somebody can raise their hand and say, "Hey, maybe that's not the way that would be."

Yasmina Tawil: Exactly. Because a lot of people don't even know if you've grown up with this, and the negative stereotypes have been from the early 1900s. It's been a long time that Arabs have been misrepresented in our media so I get it. Some people don't know that they have these biases and these misconceptions, but yes, exactly like you said, if there are no Arab or Middle Eastern or Muslim people in the writer's room or on productions, no one is ever going to flag that.

Alison Stewart: Another film that you flagged, if anybody has seen this, Emily the Criminal starring Aubrey Plaza. We have a little bit of the trailer. Then you can talk about it on the other side. People will get a sense of what we're talking about.

Actor: Let me see your driver's licence. In the next hour, you will make 200 cash, but you will have to do something illegal. You won't be in danger, but you will be breaking the law.

Actor: Yo, you're going to pay for that?

Actor: Sorry?

Actor: I said, "Are you going to pay for that?"

Actor: My God. Sorry, man.

Actor: Tomorrow you have the option to do another job. Okay?

Actor: What do I have to do?

Alison Stewart: A lot of accents, a lot of criminal behavior.

Yasmina Tawil: Yes. Honestly, I don't mind that they chose an Arab character to be the criminal in this film. It does kind of go outside the stereotypes. Also, Aubrey Plaza is wonderful in this film, but the writers did not take the time to develop their Arab characters, and their Arabness is a notable part of their characters. They are speaking Arabic, but their accents are bad. The casting is all over the place.

You have one Arab actor, I'm forgetting the name of the main criminal, but he is an actor of Arab descent, but then you have an actor playing his cousin of Israeli descent, an actor playing his mom of Iranian descent, which is Persian, and there is a scene where they visit his mom, and all of the cultural references don't make any sense. When I first watched it, I spent the entire movie trying to guess where he was supposed to be from, and when they said Lebanon, I almost screamed, because I was like, "This is not--"

Alison Stewart: "There's nothing there that's Lebanese."

Yasmina Tawil: No, not a single thing. I was like, "Really--" I was like, "It's got to be North African something. Like, no, no, no." It was just so clear that not a single Arab person was involved in this, and they really put the minimal effort into researching.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about a couple of films that you do like, that you think, "Yes, people check these out." One is called

Amreeka from 2009. Tell me a little bit about this.

Yasmina Tawil: It's directed by Cherien Dabis who some folks might know. She was recently nominated for an Emmy for Only Murders in the Building. It is probably my personal favorite Arab American film. It's about a mother and a son who moved to the States from Palestine in search of a better life. They live with a family who is already based here, and they struggle a lot as immigrants, as Arabs living in a recently post-9/11 America, as a young kid from out of the country going to high school. It deals with all of that, but it's ultimately very sweet and heartfelt and really shows I would say a very nuanced look at Arab Americans.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen to a little bit of the trailer, and we'll talk about how it maybe uses comedy. This is from Amreeka.

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Actor: Citizenship?

Actor: We don't have.

Actor: You don't have citizenship?

Actor: That's right.

Actor: Where are you from? Israel?

Actor: No, no. It's the Palestinian territory.

Actor: Your occupation?

Actor: Yes. It is occupied for 40 years.

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Actor: Raghda.

[indistinct chatter]

Actor: Welcome to America.

Actor: [foreign language]

Actor: He can't wear things like this. He'll look like an FOB.

Actor: A what?

Actor: Fresh off the boat.

Actor: I'm Muna, I'm interested in a bookkeeper job. I worked in a bank for 10 years. I came from Palestine.

Actor: Is it a Jewish-speaking country?

Actor: No, Arabic.

Actor: I got that job.

Actor: You did?

[applause]

Alison Stewart: It's a very sweet trailer. You also recommend Salt of this Sea from 2008, directed by Annemarie Jacir. It's a Palestinian film. You can watch it now on Netflix. What's this movie about?

Yasmina Tawil: It's an American Palestinian film. It's about a young woman born to Palestinian parents in Brooklyn, and she returns back to Palestine to try to live again in her homeland, connect with her heritage, and take back her recently deceased father's I wouldn't say fortune but money that he has been barred from accessing because of the occupation. It also deals with a lot of heavy themes around the occupation, the restriction of movement, the inability of Palestinians to return, but it's packaged in a sort of fun-- there's a romance line sort of a heist thing that happens. It's a really lovely film that crosses the borders between Arab American and an Arab film.

Alison Stewart: That one is called Salt of this Sea, and you can watch it on Netflix. A Lebanese movie from 2007 you're recommending is Caramel, directed by Nadine Labaki. You can rent it on video-on-demand. This is a very female-centric film. Yes?

Yasmina Tawil: Yes. This is hands down my all-time favorite film. I am very biased, but what I love about this film and why I recommended it to our listeners who may be just taking their first foray into the world of Arab cinema is that it does not address a lot of politics. It addresses some societal issues around women, but it's mostly about a group of women brought together by a salon and about their friendships and day-to-day life, and it's really sweet, beautifully made, and Nadine Labaki is an amazing actress and filmmaker, but it's just about daily life, and I think that's so important to see.

Alison Stewart: Let's see if we can get a couple more in here. There's an Egyptian film from 2018, Yomeddine, what is this about?

Yasmina Tawil: It's actually a Coptic man who lives in a leper colony. He wants to search for his family who left him there as a child. He teams up with a young boy named Obama, who is an orphan, and they take a donkey and travel across the country in search of their families. It deals a lot with ableism and racism, but once again, packaged in this really lovely road trip story.

Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:17:09] last minute and a half for sure?

Yasmina Tawil: They're all so good. It's so hard to pick. I just would say if anyone is interested in watching more Arab films, Arab American films, that we at the Arab Film & Media Institute are a great resource. We have a lot of lists and stuff already compiled on Letterboxd, and I have a hard time recommending because I love so many of them, honestly. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Sure. Let's give a shout. Tomorrow is the final day for the Arab Women in the Arts showcase, which is available online. You were the program director for that series. Quickly, what kind of art is featured?

Yasmina Tawil: Film, poetry, visual art. Our New York City portion has already happened, but there are still parts of this that you can access online at arabfilm.us/women, and we're having two screenings in Michigan, in Flint and Dearborn tomorrow.

Alison Stewart: Let's try to sneak in a call from Hassan in Hoboken. Hassan, you get the last 30 seconds.

Hassan: Thank you. Thank you, guys. I just want to make a comment. As an Arab American myself living here for the past 40 years, and I've been watching movies portraying Arabs, like let's take the Raiders of the Lost Ark with Harrison Ford. I saw Harrison Ford shooting an Arab in the souks of the Medina like he shot a fly. I remember I was young at that time, and it's so dehumanizing, and it's like human beings [crosstalk] like that.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Do you think that things have gotten better, Hassan?

Hassan: Sorry?

Alison Stewart: Do you think things have gotten better?

Hassan: Oh yes. Much better. I'm a linguist, I teach Arabic in one of the community colleges in New York. Take a show like Homeland. At least they've got the language right this time.

Alison Stewart: Hassan, I'm sorry, but you know what? We're going to run up against the hard out, but it was interesting to hear him talking about the different dialects, which was your point as well. Yasmina Tawil is the director of film programming at the Arab Film & Media Institute. Thank you for coming in studio.

Yasmina Tawil: Thank you so much for having me, Alison.

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It.

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