With three months of theatrical release in major theaters in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, it is considered to be the first English-language Iranian-American film distributed in the United States.

The story concerns the struggles of a newly-arrived Iranian brother and sister in the rough as well as better-off neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

When the 10-year-old boy Sam and his younger sister Sara arrived in Los Angeles with their mother, the only thing on their mind was to go to Disneyland.

[2] Mick LaSalle also panned Surviving Paradise in the San Francisco Chronicle, describing the film as exemplifying the worst aspects of both American and Iranian cinema, and calling it a "low-budget mess", "poorly made", "aimless", and "overly sentimental".

[3] In the LA Weekly, Professor of Cinematic Arts Holly Willis called it "laughable", writing that it "proffers an astonishing array of cultural clichés in a flat-footed story".