Polycultural Institute is proud to share a new reflection by our writer, Nawar Nemeh, on The Balancing Arab, a short film that unfolds inside the seemingly ordinary setting of a downtown Chicago gym. Through the charged conversation between Hanan and Heidi, the film examines the pressures that emerge when cultural intimacy meets partial understanding—and when what is left unsaid carries as much weight as what is spoken.
Nawar’s essay engages the film as a meditation on context: who is invited into cultural spaces, what they are prepared to hear, and what it means to appreciate a community’s art, food, and beauty while resisting the histories and political realities woven through them. His reflection considers the particular caution many Arab Americans bring to these encounters, shaped not by secrecy but by lived experience, memory, and the repeated demand to make pain legible on terms set by others.
At Polycultural Institute, we believe culture is not static decoration but a living, evolving field of relationships, histories, and shared struggles. Nawar’s piece invites us to sit with the film’s discomfort and to ask what genuine encounter requires: not simply admiration from a distance, but a willingness to listen for context, complexity, and truth.
You can find the full piece below:
In the fluorescent hum of a downtown Chicago gym, The Balancing Arab turns a training session into a study in political translation. Between the aesthetic of working out and the rhythm of exertion, Hanan and Heidi circle one another with the careful alertness of people who sense that what is unspoken may be more revealing than what is said aloud.
The space feels intimate, but not safe; ordinary, but never neutral. As the women revisit a recent event at the Arab American Cultural Center, the film lets tension accumulate in the pauses, in the mismatch between what each woman thinks is being discussed and what is actually at stake. That gap — between intention and reception, between one cultural lens and another — is where the film does its most incisive work.
The film is powerful, and I want to link it for you below. The introductory music alone will set a tone that reflects both cultural grounding and the palpable tension in the scenes to come:
For many Arab Americans, the question of context is never abstract. It is lived as caution — a learned hesitation about who to let in, how much to reveal, and what might happen when a private space becomes visible to outsiders. That guardedness is not born from secrecy so much as survival, shaped by the knowledge that Arab spaces are often read through suspicion, flattened into stereotype, or made vulnerable by a society that has long trained us to expect dis-understanding over understanding.
In that sense, reluctance can become its own kind of protection: a way of preserving dignity when the outside world has too often treated intimacy as evidence and difference as threat.
For me, the critical moment of the film comes quite early. As Hanan is asking Heidi about her experience visiting the Arab American Cultural Center with her, Heidi heaps praise onto Arab culture: describing her love for the music and food at the event coupled with a disdain for what she describes as the “politics” presented there.
Here, Heidi wants to actively separate things that for many Arabs are fused so deeply we forget their distinction. Often, I’ve been in rooms where everyone was excited to talk about my mom’s hummus recipe, but no one wanted to know about how she learned to make it from her mom while Israeli planes were flying above Damascus. In a similar sense, Heidi wanted to effectively experience the beauty of Arab culture without reckoning with the traumas deeply woven into our communities.
I would be remiss to not point to the obvious: many Americans and people in the West in general are not just apathetic or apolitical when it comes to the fate of the places that Hanan and I come from. Many are active proponents of policies that are destructive to those places.
Another part of this film that quickly struck me was Hanan’s desire to immediately chalk away the anti-imperialist rhetoric at the event she invited Heidi to as just Arabs being “hyperbolic.” I’ve been in those shoes myself before, and I find myself reflecting on that even while writing this piece.
I moved to the United States as a fifteen-year-old - a weird transition from Damascus to San Diego. I’ve been in many conversations where I’ve felt I’ve had to tiptoe around American sentiments about my home region to make a point that to many Arabs would be obvious - that American imperialism has harmed our lives.
Often, the reactionary response is similar to Heidi’s. Something along the lines of: “I do not support American foreign policy in the region, but I think you are going too far.” That sentence sounds balanced, but it often functions as a boundary. It allows the speaker to appear sympathetic while refusing the full moral and historical weight of what is being said.
The film also makes visible how quickly this distancing gets reinforced by the wider social order. Arabs are often expected to be thankful for being included, careful not to seem too intense, too angry, too political, too difficult. So when Hanan’s anti-imperialist language is brushed aside as exaggerated, it lands with the weight of a much larger pattern: the way Arab pain is routinely minimized until it sounds “reasonable” enough for non-Arab ears. Heidi’s discomfort is not just personal; it reflects a cultural reflex that asks Arabs to translate their grief into acceptable speech, even when the original truth is already clear.
Here, The Balancing Arab becomes more than a conversation between two women. It becomes a study in what happens when one person invites another into a space marked by memory, and the invitation is answered with partial recognition. The film understands that the real tension is not only between Arabs and non-Arabs, but between those who are willing to encounter context and those who prefer its decoration. That is what makes the film feel so precise, and so painful: it shows that misunderstanding is not accidental. Sometimes it is built into the terms of the encounter itself.
My reflection was inspired by watching the movie in 2026. I would love to hear any reflections you might have while reading this. The movie is short, engaging, and drives its point home quickly, so I recommend you take the time to watch it: