“I have never been to Palestine. I don’t have citizenship there; I don’t have citizenship here. I’m like a refugee free agent.” In the land of hopes and dreams – the United States – Mo, an asylum seeker, has only one desire: to be granted the U.S citizenship and care for his family. But as a floating immigrant, his family’s journey is painfully impeded by state bureacracy. In one way or another, Netflix’s new series, Mo, painstakingly mirrors the stories of millions of asylum seekers struggling to make a home in the diaspora. Directed by Solvan “Slick” Naim, the Netflix show, which premiered on 24 August, follows Mo Najjar, played by Mohamed Amer, a Palestinian-American Muslim born in Kuwait, whose family fled to the U.S during the plight of the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. The war sent the Najjar family to Alief, a suburb in Houston, Texas to live, undocumented, as they wait for their aslyum request to be heard – for 22 years and counting. Over the eight half-hour episodes, the series, billed as a semi-autobiographical dramedy, seeps into the trials and tribulations in Mo’s life…
Netflix’s ‘Mo’: On Palestinian Representation and Blurring the Line between Fiction and Reality
September 3, 2022
