Amreeka Synopsis
Augustine Arthur
Northern Virginia Community College
AMREEKA
Introduction
The movie, Amreeka, is about a single Palestinian mother, Muna who lives in the West Bank. She and her son, 16 year-old, Fadi move to the United States of America (USA) when Muna wins the US diversity visa lottery (green card). Initially, Muna does not want to take the chance of leaving her mother and her land of birth to migrate to the USA, but Fadi convinces her that in the USA, he will get the opportunity of getting better education. In addition, the humiliations, frustrations, and undue hardships Muna and her son have been experiencing at the hands of Israeli soldiers at security checkpoints makes her decide to migrate to the land of opportunities, America with her son. Amreeka is an Arabic word for America. Muna and Fadi encounter their first cultural discord at the airport in …show more content…
Some of the key terms in Chapter 5 of “Communication Between Cultures” textbook with an example from the movie are, immigration, ethnicity, perception, behavior, cultural integration, stigma, and intercultural communication among others. An example is the behavior of the students in Fadi’s school and the perception they have about people from the Middle East tagging all of them as terrorists. Ethnocentrism is the preconception and evaluation of other cultures by judging them solely by the values and standard of one’s own culture (Collins English Dictionary). Ethnocentrism affects the communication process in the sense that it creates misunderstanding, misconception, mistrust, and conflict among other factors. One example in the film is the way Israeli soldiers harass people from the Palestinian side of the West Bank. Another example is the acts of the student in Fadi’s school. In these two examples, the soldiers and the students have closed-minded conception about the ethnicity of Muna and her