Movies

Alia Shawkat plays a budding lesbian in Cherien Dabis’s “May in the Summer”

Palestinian-American filmmaker Cherien Dabis is used to being behind the camera. She was a writer for The L Word and went onto write and direct her first feature Amreeka, which premiered at Sundance in 2009. But in her new film, May in the Summer, Cherien is also the star, a happy accident of sorts that allowed Cherien to “direct from within a scene,” and also inform her about herself.

As May, Cherien is a NYC-based novelist going home to see her mother and sisters in Jordan before she marries her Muslim husband. The youngest sister, Dalia, is played by Alia Shawkat, and is a closeted lesbian until the end of the film. A sarcastic tomboy, Dalia is the least thrilled about having returned home, but happy to see her sisters. But their mother (played expertly by Hiam Abbass) is outspoken and unhappy, and has been ever since her husband left her for a younger woman. She spends most of her time sulking about May’s wedding, saying she will not attend, and carrying around a thick rope that she mindlessly attempts to unravel, even while shopping at the mall.

Everyone in the family has a secret and with the combination of smart writing and skilled actors, May in the Summer is a movie anyone who has ever felt at odds with their loved ones can relate to.

AfterEllen.com: I really enjoyed the film. Can you tell me a little bit about how you thought of the premise?

Cherien Dabis: I started conceiving of this project when I was on the festival circuit with Amreeka, as I was kind of promoting Amreeka and talking about it, that while it explored one side of my own cultural identity, that of being Arab in America, there was this whole other side that I hadn’t really explored in that film, and that’s the side of feeling-always being considered American in the Arab world. And that was where I first started getting the idea of a movie about a woman who kind of goes home. It’s really a movie about a woman who goes home. And sort of finds herself out of place there as well. It takes a look at that kind of cultural experience, the reverse cultural experience of my first film. So that’s kind of where it initially sprang from. And at the time, which was 2009 when I first started thinking about it, I was also really reading a lot about this trend of reverse migration. There were lot of immigrants leaving their adopted country in the west and returning home and finding themselves in various levels of discourse in their own culture. And there were a lot of unexpected things that were happening when they returned home. I just wanted to make a movie about that-returning home.

AE: Weddings are so symbolic in film. What made you decide to center around May’s impending nuptials?

CD: It’s always such a natural choice for what brings people together. Because there’s so many ways-my first film was much more semi-autobiographical and this film was less so. It’s more fiction. But in a really interesting way, life imitates art in this context, in this situation. Literally years into my writing of the script, my sister got married and her wedding was in Jordan. And all of my sisters and I found ourselves in Jordan, reuniting for the first time in 10 years. Like all being in Jordan for the first time in that long. It was just a really funny instance of life imitating art. When I started thinking about it, it just felt like a really natural way to bring the family together and also to really explore the rupture in family. The divorce created an enormous rupture in the family and it never fully recovered. And so I got this idea that I wanted to kind of explore divorce in a movie about a wedding, therefore being kind of a subversive wedding movie. Or a divorce drama disguised as a wedding comedy.

AE: Going in, I knew that Dalia was going to be revealed as a lesbian, but there were things that she did or said along the way that made me wonder if you were putting them in as hints-like her being a vegetarian or calling a group of men “retarded.” Was that something you did on purpose?

CD: I think it’s so much part of her personality. The character of Dalia is the one I know the most, the best, in a way. And she I think that’s just her voice. She’s a character who spoke to me very loudly, very clearly. And I always knew Alia would play that part. I worked with Alia on my first film and had such a great time working with her. She’s a talented actor and has such great comic timing. We became friends after working together on Amreeka so I had her voice in my head as I was writing that character. So there were moments where I thought, “Well what would she say…” I felt like I knew here, Dalia, the character very well. What it was about revealing her slowly through some of the comments she would make. So in a way it could be seen as dropping hints.

AE: The sisters are all so different but they all share the fact that they have a secret, so there are many parallels between them. Is that something you planned or that came out more as you were writing?

CD: I really wanted to make sure that was happening for everyone. I wanted everyone to have a secret and I wanted it to be about, a movie about a family-they’re all disconnected at the beginning. This rupture of a divorce created a lot of distance between them and things they’d never talked about. I wanted this to be a film about strong women who have to kind of overcome all of that and make themselves vulnerable enough with each other that they can reconnect and have stronger bonds with each other and also learn to love each other despite their distances. So that was something that was always there that I wanted to explore, because in some ways, the family is a microcosm of the Middle East. Everyone comes from a very different background, and they’re all different religions: One of them’s an Atheist, one of them’s a fundamentalist Christian, another one is a Buddhist. The father’s American, the mother’s Palestinian, so you have this homeland imperialist-and so I wanted to represent these different points of view within this one family that had to kind of overcome their distances in order to really become a family again.

AE: I loved the rope that May’s mother uses to unravel a relationship. Is that a real thing?

CD: That was something I had heard about. It’s sort of like an urban legend, of like a spell-a knotting rope spell. It’s something i heard about when I was younger and never forgot about because the image is so strong-the idea of someone trying to untie this incredibly bound, knotted rope. It was something that came about in the writing of the script because so much of conflict itself is internal, and I wanted to find cinematic ways to show the conflict. The knotted rope can represent the mother trying to undo binds that tie May and her fiancee, at least that’s what May thinks is what it is. So the rope became symbolic of their tug of war-their relationship.

AE: I also love the use of the proverbs that you use in the film. Why did you use them and how did you choose which ones to include?

CD: The proverbs were always there-this movie, I just always saw it with these chapter titles, chapter headings that were Arabic proverbs. In part because I’m obsessed with proverbs and Arabic proverbs in particular, I really love them because they’re such an important part of the language and the culture. And they’re these amazing nuggets pieces of wisdom that so many people use in their language and it’s amazing advice that a lot of people don’t often heed. I wanted to use them throughout and as they function and what the actual proverbs were where really involved in the making of the film. And ultimately, I ended up including less of them and really choosing them very very carefully. They kept getting changed. Ultimately the ones now, I chose, really reflect May’s emotional arc and give you a sense of-gives you a nugget of wisdom of what she’s going through emotionally. And that’s ultimately what I decided worked best for the film. But that was ultimately an evolution. Even though they were there from the beginning, their function and the actual proverbs changed. It was really really fun. And it was a fine balance too because I didn’t want to take people out of the film. And that’s why there are fewer, too, fewer title cards-it was just, every time you cut to a title card it’s kind of like a clean slate and new chapter. And you’re giving the audience something to think about as they go into a new chapter, so I didn’t want to be too obvious and sort of hit you over the head. I also didn’t want it to be too cerebral where the audience is thinking about it two to three minutes later and missing the movie, so it was a challenge but so much fun to immerse myself in them.

AE: You also star in the film-why did you decide to play the role of May?

CD: I didn’t at all write the role for myself. In fact, it was a big surprise to me that I ended up in the film. And the way it happened was I was actually casting and looking for someone to play the part. I was actively casting within the Arabic-American community, actors and non-actors. About a year into my casting effort, I was just not finding what I was looking for: Someone who was really authentic and someone who really embodied the spirit of the character. So I was kind of stuck and having conversations with the casting director like, do we go even further into the non-acting community? What do we do? And at the same time I had a number of people over the course of a year or even more than that encourage me to consider myself for that. My first response to that was “That sounds crazy. I don’t think that’s smart for me to put myself in my own movie in my acting debut. That sounds like a recipe for disaster.” And enough people said other time that I had to really stop and think about it. Like “OK, this keeps coming back to me and it’s starting to feel like something I’m mean tot do or at least meant to consider.’ It’s no longer something I could just blow off. So I did. I very hesitantly put myself on tape. I thought “Alright, let me put myself through the process at least and watch myself and see if there’s anything there that’s compelling.” I really kind of surprised myself, I have to say. It’s always really difficult to watch yourself for the first time. It’s a process and you have to get through that. Once I was able to get through that I realized there was something there I was looking for and it was true, it seemed to be the most authentic choice for the film. So I called myself back and put myself through a rigorous casting process, probably a more rigorous process than most actors have to go through, and ultimately decided to take the leap. You know I first had to really prove to myself that I could pull it off.

AE: So it’s something you would do again?

CD: Possibly. You know I’m really open to it now. It was an amazing experience and so many amazing things came out of it. There were so many things I discovered about myself in putting myself in front of the camera. Everything from insecurities I didn’t even know I had to just discovering myself more emotionally, feeling the process of preparing myself for the part really opened me up emotionally and vulnerably as a human being, filmmaker and artist. But I also really discovered, and this is kind of a great tool as a director, I discovered you could direct other actors from within a scene. When another actor is on camera but I’m also in the scene, I can give them something they’re totally not expecting. Something that’s not even written in the script that I can get whatever reaction I need from them. That was kind of an awesome discovery. I didn’t know that going on. That alone makes me want to do it again.

AE: Do you see yourself returning to television at all or do you prefer working on features?

CD: Oh I want to do both. I definitely want to go back to my origins. I loved working in television. The L Word was so great and so many fantastic people. It was such an amazing, amazing experience to have before going onto my first feature. I’m so grateful for it. And right now I am working on both. I’m working on a couple of features and i’m developing two television shows, one in particular which is a little further along and it explores a lot of the sam ethers that I’ve explored in my first two features, an Arab American family.

AE: And do you think queer themes will continue to be be a part of your work?

CD: I do. I think the feeling of being an outsider, not belonging, and kind of identity politics in general, those are themes that are really close to my heart that I absolutely see in myself continuing to explore. So I think that’s among the terrain that I come from and always will be perpetuated in my work in some way.

May in the Summer opens today in select theaters around the U.S.

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