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In the middle of the turbulence and suffering brought on by the Islamic Republic of Iran and other Muslim governments, artists are flourishing. Perhaps the political turbulence gives them the passion to tell stories that give hope and reveal beauty in dark places. Perhaps it is the challenge of having so few resources for moviemaking, or so few opportunities to speak out about their lives to the rest of the world. In "the land of the free," movies are as expendable as popcorn. In the Middle East, visionaries and artists are turning to filmmaking as a lifeline, a megaphone with which to call upon the rest of the world.

American audiences are a hard sell for such pictures. This is partly because the U.S. studios want to earn easy money off their own products, so they saturate the market with their mostly mediocre work, keeping foreign films to limited engagements in out of the way art-house theatres. But it is also due to the flawed impressions most Americans have about the region. After all, movies have taught us that Arabs are just bomb-toting terrorists bent on our destruction.

There is so much more to the story.

As I think back and count Middle Eastern characters I have seen on the big screen, I am troubled to realize how many were portrayed as psychopathic villains. In Rambo-genre films I saw as a teenager, the only difference between Nazi soldiers, Vietnamese soldiers, and Arab warriors on a jihad was the accent. Later, American action films like True Lies and Executive Decision gave us villains that were more than action figures; they had personalities and political agendas. We were being conditioned—foreigners are dangerous, violent, and evil. It's what we've been trained to expect.

The most common response to the events of September 11 was "It's like a movie." The idea of a Middle Eastern terrorist putting a bomb on an airplane was all too familiar. Most people know that the big screen gives us an insufficient representation of Arabs and others. But the steady dosage of caricature that the average American receives has angered and stirred into action those who feel slighted by the trend.

At EthicsDaily, Cliff Vaughn reports on action taken by Arab Americans in protest against negative Hollywood stereotypes. He then shares perspectives from journalists and anti-defamation activists about the effect of Hollywood on American assumptions about Arabs, and about the struggle to give the public a fair and balanced idea after September 11.

Not all American films oversimplify the issues. More serious war films like Three Kings,The Siege, and last year's Black Hawk Down offer much more realistic portrayals of American/Middle Eastern conflicts. Three Kings explores the politics and anti-American sentiments that threw fuel on the fire of the Gulf War. In The Siege, Middle Eastern terrorists strike at New York, resulting in a state of martial law. The Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee complained that the film would encourage Americans to accept unfair stereotypes of Arabs. But the film was far more fair and accurate than most; at least it included among its heroes an Arab American agent (Tony Shaloub) who offered perspective on the whole conflict and struggled with divided sympathies. Black Hawk Down, on the other hand, is too busy portraying realistic military endeavors to explore the motives, minds, and hearts of the people firing back.

In a recent online discussion, critic Peter T. Chattaway pointed to more familiar favorites, some of which you might have sitting beside the family VCR: "I watched … Disney's Aladdin [recently] and I was reminded of the controversy over how that film gave the villain the most obviously Semitic features, while making the hero, his girlfriend, and her father look rather attractive or 'normal' by American standards." He adds, "I don't think the villain of that film is made to look especially religious, so at the very least, the film cannot be called anti-Islamic."

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April (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46