When Iraqi filmmaker Oday Rasheed set out to make If You See Something, he wanted to explore what he calls “the ultimate struggle between rejection and acceptance” – a tension familiar to anyone who has felt caught between worlds. Opening in theaters this Friday (October 31), the film sheds light on that conflict through a story about love, belonging, and the complex realities of migration.
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 in love with Katie (Jacobs), an American art gallerist. When a crisis unfolds in Baghdad, the couple must confront how global events shape their lives – and their sense of identity.
Rasheed, who has lived the experience of migration himself, frames the narrative through two intertwined perspectives: that of the immigrant and that of the Americans around him. “As an immigrant, I am constantly oscillating between acceptance and rejection,” he says. “I have an admiration for those who welcomed me, and an understanding of those who ostracized me.”
Filmed entirely in New York, the film’s setting – the intimate space of an art gallery and the bustling streets outside – reflects the dual realities of modern life and human connection: private and public, observed and observing. These spaces reveal how we judge, interact, and seek understanding of one another, showing the complex interplay between personal emotion and the wider social world.
Ultimately, If You See Something is a film about connection – how it’s tested, redefined, and rebuilt across distance and difference. Ali’s ambivalence towards America – a mixture of reverence, love, and critique – becomes a reflection of the broader immigrant condition: the desire to belong while never quite feeling at home.
On a deeper level, Rasheed’s film transcends a single story. It is, as he puts it, “an extension of the same context of the ideas and realities of rejection and acceptance” that define both the immigrant experience and the act of creation itself.
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, Adam Bakri spoke to CinemaChords about embodying Ali’s fraught relationship with America, his creative partnership with Rasheed and Jacobs to sidestep familiar tropes of displacement, and how If You See Something speaks to love, identity, and resilience in uncertain times.
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.
