Ghazi Albuliwi

Ghazi Albuliwi — Biography

Ghazi Albuliwi was born on 13 June 1976 in Amman, Jordan, and moved to Brooklyn as an infant. His mother came from a village near Haifa that his family believed it had fled in 1948; he grew up speaking Arabic at home alongside Latino, African-American and Italian friends, and began doing stand-up comedy at age seventeen. After watching a group of Israelis laughing at a Jerusalem café, he was inspired to write a comedy that would make audiences forget an Arab protagonist's identity, which became Peace After Marriage, the story of a Muslim Palestinian-American man in New York who marries an Israeli Jewish woman seeking a green card. He wrote, directed and starred in the film, a Turkish-French-American co-production described by The New York Times as a roughly $1 million project that collected several festival awards; its screenplay had already won Best Script through the Tribeca All Access program in 2010. Hiam Abbass played his character's mother, alongside co-stars Thom Bishops and Assaf Cohen, and the film premiered at the 2013 Abu Dhabi Film Festival. Albuliwi was also a finalist for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Nicholl Fellowship, worked on the film West Bank Brooklyn, and appeared in the 2012 film The Inheritance; his work is often noted for its themes of non-belonging.