tor after the talk and got his card—which he carried with him to California. During his trip, without making an appointment, Omeish took the bus to Akkad’s office. To his surprise, Akkad agreed to meet with him. “Honestly, he was very blunt,” remembers Omeish. “Maybe a little too blunt. ‘This is very hard,’ he said. ‘It’s almost impossible. It’s constant rejection. People will be ruthless.’ Looking back now, he was trying to be honest with me. And I think he was testing me out, to see if I had the resolve to make it.” After a month in Los Angeles, and emboldened by Akkad’s challenge, Omeish returned to Virginia determined to prove he could survive as a filmmaker—despite having never made a film. “I sat my parents down again and told them, ‘I think I’m going out to California permanently to pursue film,’” Omeish recounts. “And my parents were like, ‘Are you crazy? Did you get a job?’” Amongst first generation Arabs in the U.S., it isn’t uncommon for a man to live with his parents’ until he’s in his 30s. “They have these very specific ideas,” says Omeish. “You have to get a job, get married, and then you can move out on your own.” Without his parents’ permission, Omeish felt he had no choice but to stay in Virginia and look for work. He wanted a job in film production, but with no experience, and few references, he ended up as a photo coordinator for Time-Life Books, managing and editing archival photo assets for their catalogue of titles. (Books in the Time-Life library include The Art of Sewing, Understanding Computers, and The Time-Life Book of Family Finance.) “I remember,” Omeish says, “being in a cubicle for six months, and I just felt dead. I told myself, ‘If I do this for the rest of my life, I’m going to die. So I need to get the hell away from here and figure something out.’” One day, dismayed by the tedium of the job, Omeish called his brother, Mohammed, who was running a relief NGO providing aid to Kosovo, and on a whim volunteered his services as a documentarian. Omeish told Mohammed, “‘I’ll do everything for free, just buy me the equipment. Just buy me the camera, the ticket, and I will shoot everything you guys are doing over there, and you can have the footage. I just need to get out of here.’” Omeish flew Kosovo a few weeks later, three days after the NATO bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosovic’s army had forced hundreds of thousands of Serbian refugees to flee. When Omeish arrived, the displaced Serbs were pouring back into the country. “I’d say 75 percent of the country was destroyed,” says Omeish. “And it was the first time I’d seen the effects of war.” Equipped with a video camera, Omeish traveled throughout Kosovo, intending to film for a week. But he ended up staying a month. “Random people I met were so kind. They just opened up extra rooms in their houses for me. I made quick friends with the locals, and they took me around the country to interview people about life, about their country, about the effects of war. That was the first time I can honestly tell you that I knew I had to do this for the rest of my life.”
When Omeish returned to Virginia, he sat his parents down for a third time. “‘I came to you about a year ago,’” Omeish says, recounting the conversation, “‘and you guys said I couldn’t leave your home. But I’m going to explain something. I did the job thing, and I hated it. All I’m asking is for your support and blessing. I don’t want a penny from you. Just tell me that I can do it.’ And my parents saw that I was very serious. They were scared because in our culture, it’s very difficult to let your son go out on his own with just a dream to support him. They were scared, and understandably so. But they gave their blessing in the end.”
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fter his first foray shooting in Kosovo, Omeish commuted from Los Angeles to the Middle East and North Africa throughout the next decade. When the Izmit earthquake struck Northeastern Turkey in 1999, killing 50,000 people, Omeish filmed at the epicenter. “A year later,” Omeish says, “there was a famine in Ethiopia in the south, and I went there. And then came the Chechen/Russian war, and I went to Georgia—where 7,000 refugees had gone to escape the
“I just wrote a simple will saying, ‘If anything happens, blah-blah-blah. Forgive me, blah-blah-blah.’ Because we both really thought that might be it, that we might never see each other again.” violence—and filmed in the camps.” He began shooting his first feature film, Occupation: 101, about the historical and political roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the early aughts. In 2005 and 2006, it toured the international festival circuit, and remains a curriculum staple at colleges around the world. When the Arab Spring effloresced in early 2011, Omeish was working on a documentary about the 2008 Israeli bombing of Gaza City, told from the perspective of the only western journalists—Aymun Mohyeldin and Sharine Tadros—that didn’t evacuate during the threeweek siege. But after al-Abidine’s ouster, with Mubarak disempowered in Egypt, and protests flourishing in Libya, Omeish knew he couldn’t stay in California. By the time revolution stirred in Tripoli, though, Omeish was married with two young children. “But I told my wife,” says Omeish, “‘I think I need to go. I need to do something. I don’t know what it is, but I need to go and do something and show what’s going on in Libya— to be involved in any way that I can. This is my chance.” Omeish’s wife, whom he asked me not to name, supported her husband despite the consequences. “We made the decision that I was going to go to Libya,” says Omeish, “and that I might not come back. We really
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