Operation Hummus is a fifteen-minute dark satire that serves as both the capstone of my MFA thesis and a proof of concept for a future feature.

The story follows three Arab protagonists, Huda (Sudanese), Muhammed (Iraqi), and Ali (Egyptian American), and a naïve American wanna-be anarchist named Freeman as they bumble through a heist that upends expectations about identity, activism, and consumer culture.

More than a heist comedy, Operation Hummus is a collective expression of defiance and love, defiance of the narrow stereotypes assigned to Arabs in Western media, and love for the messy, plural identities we carry. To challenge the notion that the “Arab world” is monolithic, we deliberately wrote characters with distinct backgrounds and dialects: an Iraqi, a Sudanese, and an Egyptian American. Rather than positioning identity politics as an end goal, the film questions what happens when labels replace people. It resists flattening its characters into symbols and instead lets them be contradictory, flawed, funny, and human.

To bring this vision to life, we are assembling a cast and crew drawn from both North Africa and the wider diaspora. This mix of perspectives will ensure the humour lands authentically and expand opportunities for artists whose voices rarely make it onto U.S. screens.

This project is deeply personal. I arrived in the American South in the summer of 2024, moving from Cairo to Georgia as a working filmmaker turned international student. I found myself living through elections, visa uncertainty, government defunding, and rising xenophobia. Comedy emerged not as a stylistic choice but as survival—the only way to process the absurdity of living inside these contradictions. The film reflects this present moment without lecturing, capturing a generation that feels disillusioned on the surface yet deeply caring and ready to resist.

As an Egyptian and North African filmmaker, this film reclaims narrative agency for people whose identities are too often reduced to trauma, war, or victimhood. Operation Hummus insists on something rarer: the right to be funny, complicated, and alive. This film is my way of laughing back at the stereotypes, inviting audiences to do the same, and showing that we can reclaim even the most fraught narratives with humour and humanity. It is my glitter-covered goodbye to two years in the U.S. that were confusing, exasperating, eye-opening, and unexpectedly transformative.