I was fortunate to discover Karina Dandashi and her work at the Indy Shorts Film Festival in 2023. Her short film, “Cousins,” which screened at the festival, was about a queer Arab American woman and a night she spends with her long distance cousin in New York City. It was a slice of life film, but it spoke volumes. So when Karina reached out about her latest short, “Baba I’m Fine,” I immediately knew I had to watch it. The film premiered at SXSW on International Women’s Day. The story centers on Sama, an Arab American teenage girl in Pittsburgh, played by Hibah Abdellatif. Her girlfriend blows off their Friday plans, and the teen copes with her romantic rejection by blasting music in her room. When her dad (Aladeen Tawfeek) suggests they hang out, she reluctantly agrees. Their evening takes an unexpected turn as a message forces her to choose between authenticity and keeping up appearances.
Karina Dandashi is a Syrian-American filmmaker born and raised in Pittsburgh. Her films explore identity through the intersection of family, culture, and sexuality in the Arab American diaspora. She loves pop culture, railroads, musicals and being a thought daughter. She puts herself in her own films because she likes making things harder than they have to be. Karina was a 2021 Sundance X Adobe Ignite Fellow and featured in the inaugural creators issue as Marie Claire’s “Top 21 Creators to Watch” in 2022. Her feature script, “Out of Water,” was chosen for the Film Independent 2023 screenwriting lab. She has been supported by organizations such as the Jerome Foundation, the Colin Higgins Foundation, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Heinz endowments. Her short film “Cousins” (2023) is distributed on the New Yorker.
What inspired this project?
“Baba I’m Fine” is actually a short proof of concept for a feature that I wrote titled “Out of Water” that went to the Film Independent Lab back in 2023. So it has the same themes with queerness, coming of age, and being Arab American. It has the same characters with a father and daughter, which are the main characters in the feature as well. I think the inspiration for the short film came from really just wanting to give the audience a taste of the world that I was trying to build with these characters, and the dynamic between father and daughter, which is shown to you visually and tonally. The short film was also kind of an experiment for the feature. I’ve never shot in Pittsburgh before, which is my hometown. The feature is set in Pittsburgh and I just wanted to capture the texture of the city on the big screen. Showing Pittsburgh onscreen was probably the main inspiration for doing the short in the first place.
After seeing your short film “Cousins,” and then seeing this one, I love how you touch on family relationships in authentic ways. Can you talk a little bit about why you bring those stories to the screen, and the importance of that?
I think there was a similar disconnect that I tried to capture in “Cousins.” That was with the cultural disconnect between two cousins that haven’t really seen each other in a long time. The main reason is that the two were separated by an entire ocean. And in “Baba I’m Fine,” I was very interested in capturing the disconnect between a father and a daughter. I think with this short specifically, I was trying to capture this feeling that I had growing up. Part of it was the frustration of age, and a kind of grief that came with that between me and my Syrian immigrant dad, and the ways that we misunderstand each other. In that classic teenage style, I tried to express that through pop and punk music. I had those set pieces, and that was a fun way for me to express it.
I also feel like my immigrant dad is very much like “show, don’t tell.” I mean he had so many gestures of love he tried to show me all of the time to try to connect with me. I still found it to be very difficult to be vulnerable and open up with him about my life. I think I was just to capture that feeling of frustration that came with that.
Can you talk about your main actress, Hibah Abdellatif, and how it was working with her in this particular role?
Hibah was just incredible. In the past with “Cousins,” I cast myself and my friends. It was a time for experimenting. We just didn’t have a lot of money and we kind of just went for it. I took the casting process very seriously for this film. I really just wanted to find someone I could even carry into the future. To find the actor to play Sama, I used an awesome casting director, Chastity Thomas. We went through a lot of auditions, and Hibah just stood out from the rest. She captured this special presence. She had this vulnerability when she was saying her lines, and I really liked that. She felt very sincere, and is very young too. We actually had to have her parent on set, because she’s a minor. She’s a high school student, which also played to the authenticity of the role.
She was just an absolute superstar, and had never acted in a film before. She just knocked it out of the park. I asked, “Her how did you learn how to act? How does it come to you so easily?” She said she actually learned how to act by reading books to herself in the mirror. When she would read, she’d play the different characters. Her enthusiasm on set was incredible. During the shoot, my DP and I were like freaking out about how good she was. Whenever we asked her to do the role again, she was like, “That was so much fun, let’s do it again.” She just had this awesome spirit that totally elevated the mood all throughout.
Can you talk about the editing in the film? I loved how you would seamlessly switch from music video to the narrative part of the film.
I love my editor Taylor Gianotas, who helped cut “Cousins” as well. I brought him onto that project because I was feeling that “Cousins” was a little slow in its pacing. As a comedy, I felt the pacing should go quicker. So I did some research on editors who worked at a high level and Taylor had edited a lot of shorts that went to SXSW and Sundance and just happened to be in the comedic genre. So he helped quicken the pace of “Cousins,” with the bantering back and forth.
I really liked working with him, so I brought him on this project. I think it’s important to have a good editor because it helps make the film what it is. Taylor is just so creative. He brought so many interesting ideas to the film, like the catwalk scene when she’s walking out of the house. And he brought ideas to the transitions with the music video sequences. I think he was very smart in the ways he cut the film, and broke up a scene. Our collaboration together make the film so much stronger. I love him, he’s an amazing editor.
Can you talk about working in your hometown of Pittsburgh, and how was that experience for you?
I had lived in New York for eight years and I had just moved back to Pittsburgh because I wanted to make this short in my hometown, and develop the feature there as well. I didn’t know any local crew, and I knew nothing about the Pittsburgh film scene.
I connected with these producers, Stephen Turselli and Dan Duthie of Solano Pictures. They’re incredible. They’re just super open, super friendly, and wanted more diverse stories in Pittsburgh. They had been working on a couple of TV shows, but were looking for more diverse projects.
They were really into my story and supported me. They were able to connect me to so many local crew here in Pittsburgh. It was a great way for me to meet more of the film community here. It was pretty awesome meeting local people that work in film. So I think I owe a lot of the success of the project to them. I’m very lucky that I found them. They helped make this film happen.
What do you think makes the Pittsburgh film community stand out compared to New York or LA?
I’m newer to this community, so I’ve just gotten a taste of it. But hopefully I’ll be more in this film community when I make the feature, and I put myself out there even more. But it just seems like a very personable city. Everyone seems to know each other. The vibes are just community based in a lot of ways. I definitely want to make more work in Pittsburgh and continue to connect with people here. I really think stories like mine stand out a little more here, because in New York City there’s so much diversity. I was so lucky to find a big Arab community in New York when I was there. But here in Pittsburgh, I think they really need these kinds of stories and need different narratives. I think as filmmakers, it’s kind of cool to be making work in a place where people haven’t really seen these kinds of stories before. And these kind of onscreen stories will help bring diversity more to the forefront here.
What do you hope people see in your film?
I think I really just wanted to show the ways that a father and daughter can still connect and love each other on a very deep level despite the miscommunication and the misunderstandings that come between them. I was really interested in telling this story because in the past year, I feel like Arab men were being put in a very harsh, one dimensional light. That’s something that unfortunately happens a lot, especially in the Western media. I just really wanted to show specifically an Arab man and an Arab father being seen in a very soft light where they could be goofy, loving and even chaotic, like in the scene when the dad lifts himself through the sunroof. I really wanted to bring this character to the screen in a big, fun and goofy cinematic moment. It also allows him be a little feminine by putting his daughter’s heart sunglasses on. That’s a side of Arab men and Arab dads that we don’t really get to see very often. And that’s very true to my own dad. I wanted to break them out of that strict, Arab dad role. You don’t see that, especially in queer stories. I wanted to spin a different lens on that.
I also wanted to show that Arab teenage girl angst and rage with girly pop and punk music. It was fun to put this interesting lens on that through music. I also just want to see more Arab women raging more onscreen and having those moments. We don’t have to be like these perfect daughters. We can have these toxic, messy moments. We can act out. We don’t have to be understood and we don’t want to be, you know? So I think I was looking for those messy moments as well to put on the screen.
