Iraqi filmmaker Oday Rasheed approached If You See Something with a clear purpose: to address one of the most fundamental human dilemmas – the delicate negotiation between acceptance and rejection, between the familiar and the unknown. Opening in cinemas this Friday (October 31), the film explores this conflict through a story of love, displacement, and the fragile balance between personal desire and global circumstance.
Co-written by Rasheed, Avram Ludwig, and Jess Jacobs, the film follows Ali (Adam Bakri), an Iraqi doctor seeking asylum in New York, who falls for Katie (Jacobs), an American art gallerist. Their burgeoning romance is soon tested when a crisis breaks out in Baghdad, forcing them to confront how global events shape personal lives – and how identity can become fragile ground.
Rasheed, who has experienced the immigrant journey firsthand, tells the story through dual perspectives: the immigrant navigating a new world, and the Americans around him attempting to understand that journey. “As an immigrant, I am constantly oscillating between acceptance and rejection,” Rasheed reflects. “I have an admiration for those who welcomed me, and an understanding of those who ostracized me.”
If You See Something ultimately serves as a meditation on belonging, identity, and the ties that bind across distance, difference, and circumstance – a nuanced reflection on what it means to claim a place in a world at once welcoming and alienating.
The film also stars Tarek Bishara, Lucy Owen, Hadi Tabbal, Krystina Alabado, Reggie Gowland, Hend Ayoub, Nasser Faris, and Reed Birney.
Ahead of the release, Rasheed and Jacobs spoke to CinemaChords about the personal experiences that informed the story and how they balanced them to keep the film’s universal themes front and centre while negotiating the intersection of political context and emotional truth. Jacobs also reflected on the challenge of portraying a character caught between her own identity and empathy for someone from a very different background, hoping for a resonance that reaches beyond the immigrant experience. They also spoke candidly about the untimely passing of co-writer Avram Ludwig, noting the enduring aspects of his vision and the legacy embedded in the completed film.
To learn more about the asylum process and immigration in the U.S. you can read the work from the National Immigration Forum, Migration Policy Institute, and the American Immigration Council.
