“If you think you know what an Arab is, you don’t,” filmmaker Usama Alshaibi says. “I don’t know either.”
Yet he felt far from assimilated. “When I was a kid I felt like no one was like me here in the U.S. or in the Middle East,” Alshaibi says. “It’s this strange cross-cultural identity that’s almost a third identity. It’s neither/or.”
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In 1980 Iraq invaded Iran in an attempt to occupy the oil-producing and largely Arab province of Khuzestan. This set off the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. “My dad would say, ‘We’re on the good side, the U.S. is supporting us,’” Alshaibi says.
“You can imagine growing up in war, and living in Saudi Arabia, where everyone is very religious, then coming to the U.S. to attend high school, where everyone is concerned about dating,” says Alshaibi. As his religiosity faded he grew increasingly interested in art. After studying painting for a year at the University of Iowa, he dropped out, but he continued to paint.
In 1994, Alshaibi moved to Chicago to enroll at Columbia College as a film student. He paid his way with loans and by working in the school’s equipment cage and at Nationwide Video. “Columbia trained us to think about the Hollywood model,” Alshaibi says. “We had to work on these larger-scale student projects and they followed that hierarchy.” Other students were making the movies; he was their production assistant, the gofer making coffee runs. “I thought, what’s the difference between this and washing dishes?”
“I was afraid to leave my house,” he says. “I was afraid to tell people my name. My mom suggested I change my name to cause less problems. But I stuck to my guns. I’m very proud of who I am and what my name is.”
A few weeks on the ground shattered his optimism. “It was like a record scratch. I felt very American. Iraqis kind of got used to living in war. It was difficult for me to go through the bombing and the threat of being killed or kidnapped or beheaded.”
