As Israel occupies her home in 90s Lebanon, a stubborn teenage girl and her family who have returned to the homeland after growing up in Australia struggle just to get by socially as they brave the real danger around them, their judgemental peers. In this show, the scariest thing about The Middle East may very well be their teenage girls.

CAST LIST:

Narrator: Steve Rizzo
Sue/Mary Em: Val Cole
Fatima/Mother/Mosque Worker: Hannah Ehman
Nour/Layal: Julie Sheppard
Group of Men/News Reporter/Mohammad Saab: Sean Ballantyne

Get to know the writer:

1. What is your screenplay about?

Ajnabiyeh is a comedy series focused on a 15-year-old girl and her family
and friends living in Lebanon during the Israeli occupation in 1998. It’s
based on my mom’s experience being born in Australia then moving to
Lebanon in her adolescence. I thought the kind of reverse fish out of water model was interesting. The characters are in a space that is technically their home, but they feel like foreigners or outsiders anyway. I think despite the specific premise, the feeling of outsider status is quite universal to any immigrants or children of immigrants.

2. What genres does your screenplay fall under?

The subject matter is intense, but it is a comedy. I think it’s important that
there’s a comedy set in the Middle East. It’s a strange experience when the only media with people who look like you are war films or soap opera-like dramas where the men are villains and the women are victims. I think the highest form of normalization and integration of a marginalized group of people into mainstream media is when there’s a family sitcom about the group. That, and a rom-com, I feel are the “alright, we’re in” signs of the industry.

3. Why should this screenplay be made into a show?

It’s always the right time for humanizing and humorous stories about
misunderstood groups of people, but now more than ever, the world is in
desperate need for images from the Middle East that do not involve death
or destruction. I also just love the teen genre from My So Called Life to
Stranger Things and think that the space can benefit from some new blood and life in the teen space.

4. How would you describe this script in two words?

Facetious history.

5. What movie have you seen the most times in your life?

Probably Shrek 2. I love the whole franchise. And it’s one of those kid
movies that only get better when you get older, not worse. I really
appreciate the subversion of the disney tropes and now knowing about the dreamworks-disney feud, it makes it that much more fun to watch. It’s
always great when children's screenwriters don’t underestimate their
audience.

6. How long have you been working on this screenplay?

3 years at this point. It started when I realized one night that the name
Maryem with a space in between is Mary Em and that idea of a girl going by not a new name, but just a different writing of her own name stuck with me and she was a kind of alter ego for myself and represented a part of myself I wish I was allowed to express growing up which was loud and irresponsible and mischievous. I also love that her initials spell out Me. She was in a couple other stories I wrote before she became the heroine in Ajnabiyeh.

7. How many stories have you written?

I have 2 other comedy pilots, a spec script for Abbott Elementary, a comedy feature, and an original children's TV pilot.

8. What is your favorite song? (Or, what song have you listened to the most times in your life?)

Landslide - Fleetwood Mac

9. What obstacles did you face to finish this screenplay?

I was a history education major in school, so I really had to teach myself
screenwriting format. I would watch my favorite comedy pilots a million
times, break them down scene by scene, analyze each scene’s purpose and function, read a lot of scripts to get a hang of the many ways script writing differs from prose writing, and used whatever online resources I could find to learn what it is a producer is looking for. Thankfully so much of this information is free on the internet.

10. Apart from writing, what else are you passionate about?

I love history. It’s kinda why it seeps into so much of my writing. Traveling
is a really fun extension of that and something I got to do more of this year.

It’s like the world goes from 2 dimensional to 3 dimensional when you step into what it was in the past. You feel very small for a moment. It’s the same feeling as binge watching a great TV show and losing yourself for some time.

11. You entered your screenplay via Network ISA. What has been your
experience working with the submission platform site?

It’s pretty comparable to services like coverfly but it has this unique feature where production companies or agencies will be looking for certain projects and genre types. I’ve had my script get downloaded a few times, but nothing further than that yet.

12. What influenced you to enter the festival? What were your feelings on
the initial feedback you received?

I got really great feedback and I don’t mean that in that it was just glowing
reviews but in that it was so specific and constructive. Feedback can be a real hit or miss – I've once gotten feedback where I just know they only read the first 8 pages cause that’s all they would reference, but the feedback I got references and quoted lines from the very first to the very last page. I remember taking the feedback and after each sentence “replying” to each thing, writing out how I would address each piece of feedback, creating a to-do list of revisions to make and making each one.