One of my favorite movies from this year’s Seattle International Film Festival was Amreeka, writer/director Cherien Dabis’ debut feature, afilm about a single mother who leaves the tumult of the West Bank with her teenaged son in tow to reach the golden paradise of small-town Illinois. Well, okay, it’s not quite the Shangri-la that Muna imagined it to be. She’s welcomed to the United States by Customs agents who regard her home-made treats as a threat to safety and a fleeting moment of distraction wipes out her hard-earned savings, leaving her penniless. At least she has a place to go, the home of her sister and brother-in-law, whose ordinary middle class lifestyle is being threatened by all those “patriotic” Americans who suddenly can’t bear the idea of being treated by the friendly Palestinian dentist because, hey, all those Arabs are terrorists, after all.

Eager to get back on her feet, Muna looks for a job but all her skills and past experience count for nothing and the only employment she can find is working at a local White Castle, a state so embarrassing for her that she pretends to be working at the bank next door. In the meantime, her son Fadi is welcomed to his new high school by a group of kids fully willing to accept him as a potential suicide bomber. Dabis, who based the screenplay on her own family’s immigrant experience, doesn’t shy away from the bleaker aspects of being an immigrant, particularly an immigrant from the Middle East. Dabis was a teenager during the first Gulf War and her family was shunned, threatened and abused by people far too willing to believe the stereotypes fed to them by a biased media.

Despite all this, Amreeka is anything but dreary. Muna, whose character was based on Dabis’ aunt, is human enough to feel despair but has a cheerful, optimistic outlook and a strong spirit. She stumbles through her often confusing new home, a place where everyone else has mastered the unspoken rules that Muna doesn’t even know exist, but she manages to get back on her feet with her hopefulness intact. She’s not quite sure how she’s going to do it, but she is going to find her path, and if she has to flip burgers to survive, well, then, she’s going to flip burgers.

Fadi, in the meantime, not only has the face the usual tribulations of being a teenager (why do people over-sentimentalize these years as the “best days of [your] life”? Adolescence means too old to get the perks of childhood, too young to get the perks of adulthood but just the right age to get the short end of either.) but has to do it in a foreign country where people can’t even get some basic facts right – one of the most engaging scenes for me in Amreeka came when one of Fadi’s jerky classmates insists his brother might die because of [Fadi's] people and Fadi refuses to be gentle in explaining that Iraq and Palestine are hardly the same nation.

Muna and Fadi are strangers in a strange land, but they’re not alone. They have their family–Fadi’s cousin Salma has to take charge of his wardrobe to keep him from looking like a hopeless rube but she’s a genuine friend and ally and a strong voice of her own–and Muna’s warmth earns her friendship and support from a wide variety of people she encounters.

Dabis created Amreeka both as an expression of her own experiences melding two diverse cultures and as a way to counter the stereotyping and ignorance so often applied to Palestinians who are no more a homogeneous lot than are all Americans. Dabis believes that there are good and bad people everywhere–in Amreeka she gives us a look at both but it’s clear that the good people matter more.

Amreeka opens Friday night at the Neptune.

The Seattle International Latino Film Festival runs Friday through Sunday at NWFF, the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, and Cinerama presenting a variety of films that represent the vitality and diversity of Spanish-speaking communities around the world. Forget the stereotypes: these films present a broad range of Latino expression presenting multiple viewpoints and experiences. Some of the screenings include: Children of the Amazon is a documentary by Brazilian filmmaker Denise Zmekhol in which she travels a highway into the depths of the Amazon to find the Surui and Negarote children she’d photographed fifteen years ago and to document how their lives were changed when a road was built directly into the heart of the forest.

El Regalo, from Chile, is a feature about two men who try to cheer up their recently widowed friend by inviting him to the Chilean hot springs and bringing along the woman who was his first true love as a young man.

An upper-class young man from Bogota is kidnapped by a guerilla group and must struggle to hold on to his life and his soul in the midst of violent conflict in La Milagrosa.

Other films in the festival include documentaries and features both serious and comedic.

Midnight at the Egyptian: Cult sci-fi comedy adventure The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

Midnight at the Neptune: Paranormal, a thriller about a couple who set up a surveillance system to gather evidence proving that their house is haunted almost universally described in reviews as one of the scariest films ever made even though (maybe because of?) its minimal gore.