SYNOPSIS
New York City, Spring 2009.
Maryam “Mary” Amiri lives in a post-racial world.
Except, she doesn’t.
Mary is Persian-American, and to her it feels like this is the one fact no one will let her forget. The U.S. government seems to be in no rush to grant her citizenship, though she’s lived in the states since she was two-months old. Her childhood friend, Behrouz, a self-styled Iranian nationalist, keeps prodding Mary to charge up her Persian pride… and change her Facebook status in support of the Iranian Green Revolution. Her best friend, Claire, has a serious boyfriend, artistic aspirations and new tattoos to commemorate her half-Korean/half-Persian heritage. And then there’s her family: loving, fun and supportive. To Mary, they are also embarrassingly Iranian, with their cultural misunderstandings, immigrant stories and over-the-top Persian weddings that they keep forcing her to attend.
Furthermore, Mary’s attempt to escape into the whitewashed world of her Yale-educated paramour, Ben Shaw, provides little consolation or comfort. The WASP-y financier doesn’t get her (or her struggle with multiculturalism) and doesn’t seem to want to get it, unless he is drunk and it’s late at night.
Mary is destined to remain lonely and misunderstood in her search for identity, unless she can grow up in time to cut the strings that are holding her back and embrace the ties that bind us all together.
If You Stay takes a novel and comedic look at the classical bildungsroman. When you are both an immigrant and an American, is it what’s inside you, or your status as an outsider that defines you?
DIRECTORS’ STATEMENT
Everyone connects with the coming-of-age story: shedding old skins for new ones as we discover we can be more than just what we’ve inherited. In If You Stay, we’ve updated the classic American coming-of-age story with the added ingredient of the coming-to-America experience. What does it mean for our protagonist, Mary, to define herself as an adult and an American when, until now, it has been her friends, lovers and lack of citizenship that have defined her?
As women who moved to NYC shortly after college, we want the film to capture the flux of energy the city holds for a young woman. The kinetic pace of experiencing and accomplishing everything before the city consumes you, punctuated by the seemingly interminable lulls spent waiting… in lines… on boys… for promotions.
More so, as a Persian-American, I, Roja, wanted to capture that tension between belonging and alienation central to the first-generation experience: we are not the immigrants rebuilding our lives, yet we are not untouched by our parents’ struggle to fulfill the American Dream. Trapped in this geographic and cultural limbo, we often feel like there is no true home. Though, like all American kids, we grew up on – and are largely defined by – pop culture, we rarely, if ever, see our unique experience reflected in it.
Why not throw a little saffron onto this rice crispy landscape to see the culture truly snap, crackle and pop?
With If You Stay, we want to show how these flavors blend.
We want to capture the sometimes cringe-worthy comedy in bringing your immigrant parents and your American friends together.
We want to highlight the kids of the Diaspora bending the vocabulary and making the art that redefines the face of America.
We want to explore what happens to a girl like Mary who refuses to take part in this process of hybridization.
What does she miss out on? And how can she find her way back to connecting with her roots – like honoring those she’s left behind by participating in ancient wedding traditions of her parents’ homeland, or simply showing solidarity with her Iranian contemporaries on Facebook.
Through Mary’s journey, we want to explore the difficulty of growing up in the context of the tan generation, where multiethnic youth create new identities and a new American culture out of the pieces of the cultures they’ve left behind.
ROJA GASHTILI & JULIA LERMAN 2012