It stars Nisreen Faour, Melkar Muallem, Hiam Abbass, Alia Shawkat, Yussuf Abu-Warda, Joseph Ziegler, and Miriam Smith.

[4] Muna Farah (Nisreen Faour) is a divorced Palestinian Christian mother raising her teenage son Fadi (Melkar Muallem).

After a difficult time with customs, Muna is reunited with her sister, Raghda Halaby (Hiam Abbass), physician brother-in-law Nabeel (Yussuf Abu-Warda) and their three children Salma (Alia Shawkat), Rana (Jenna Kawar), and Lamis (Selena Haddad).

She maintains the facade with the help of an employee of the bank next door to White Castle (Miriam Smith) and her blue-haired high school drop-out co-worker, Matt (Brodie Sanderson).

Later, when some of the students make derogatory remarks to Fadi, he gets into a fight and his mother is called to meet with the school's principal Mr. Novatski (Joseph Ziegler).

Muna asks him to drop her off at the bank but forgets her purse, an act which leads him to discover that she works secretly at White Castle.

On another day, local high school students make discriminatory remarks about Fadi to Muna while she is working in White Castle.

Muna contacts Mr. Novatski who rushes to the police station and tells the officers that the accusations are without merit and that he will assume responsibility for Fadi.

And we planned long takes and fluid camera movements choreographed in congruence with the blocking of the actors to lend an organic, true-to-life feel.

Throughout the process, I was influenced by the work of such directors as Mike Leigh, John Cassavetes, and Robert Altman for their amazing ability to re-create the truth of everyday life.

I also referenced photographers like Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Dorothea Lange and Lee Friedlander for their visual style, ironic wit and depiction of social issues.

Dabis also traveled for months to hold casting auditions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dearborn, Toronto, Winnipeg, Paris, Amman, Beirut, Haifa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ramallah.

Dabis chose to make her fictional version of this principal, Mr. Novatski (Joseph Ziegler), a Jewish-American to create parallel experiences related to "immigration and displacement.

"[14] The scenes in the Halaby home were set in the house of a local Palestinian family from Ramallah with three daughters close in age to the characters in the film.

[16] American critic Roger Ebert gave Amreeka three and a half out of four stars and described it as "Cherien Dabis's heart-warming and funny first feature.