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Keith Reamer Cuts Amreeka
photo by Bill Murray
The prospect of working with a language foreign to one’s own would be a daunting challenge for virtually anyone. Yet, Amreeka, in which more than half the language is spoken in Arabic, was an adventure on which editor Keith Reamer was eager to embark. The movie, written and directed by Cherien Dabis, tells the timely story of a middle-aged Palestinian woman who, with her teenage son, immigrates to the U.S. Amreeka chronicles their heartfelt, touching journey in America. Reamer is no stranger to the editing world, having spent more than 20 years editing features, including such acclaimed independent movies as I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and Three Seasons (1999).
Just before Amreeka’s big debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, MM spoke with the editor about how he approached such a unique project.
Kyle Rupprecht (MM): You cut Amreeka on Avid Adrenaline. Why do you prefer using Avid as opposed to Final Cut Pro?
Keith Reamer (KR): For me, it is really the level of comfort that I enjoy, using Avid software as opposed to FCP. I went from film, in 1995, to the Avid platform and found it very intuitive and an easy match for my film skills. At that time (1995) I’d never even owned a computer, let alone switched one on! I was a complete novice. Yet, from the start, I found working with Avid systems to be organic to my processes and very much like working in film. I’ve cut a few projects on FCP and do not yet feel the same about that platform. I find that it is not as intuitive as Avid and, in its operation, is much more labor intensive—I end up spending much more time navigating the application than simply using the tool as designed. However, having more than one NLE platform to choose from, has helped to even out the playing field in making advanced, highly-evolved post production systems available for many, many individuals and projects with a diverse assortment of resources. It has forced Avid to be price- and feature-competitive and that is a very good thing.
MM: More than half of Amreeka is in Arabic, and you handled all the subtitles as the movie was cut. Did that make the editing process more difficult?
KR: Yes, but fortunately we had a great team, which was lead by our director, Cherien Dabis, who very much knew the film she wanted to make! She was a phenomenal, fun, agile collaborator, bold leader and also fluent in Arabic. Misako Shimizu was our assistant editor during production. She did a great job getting the project up and running in the Avid system. Her role was taken over by Eddie Nichols—a patient, good-humored, hard-working guy—who stayed with the project, through all of its twists and turns, through to the lock.
Of course, working in a language alien to one’s own is always a challenge. I have done it twice before—on Tony Bui’s Three Seasons (Vietnamese) and Ann Hu’s Shadow Magic (Mandarin)—and the complication is always multi-fold. First, there’s the actual translation of the dialogue when you begin screening dailies and working on scenes. Since there is no actual translator in the room, this is accomplished through careful attention to the phonetics of the speech—how words sound, repeated phrases, etc.—as it matches up against the lined script (assuming you have a lined script, which in foreign-shot productions is not always the case). Thank goodness for Avid’s Locator tool! Once these mechanics are done, it is a matter of using one’s intuition to read and evaluate the performances, the subtexts that you feel are at work, or might like to see at work, in each scene and the film as a whole. On Amreeka, I spent a lot of time watching the body language of the actors, watching their eyes, and looking for the spark of invention in the performances; things that crystallized what I believed to be the intent of our director. It is a simple quest for the truth; one that I find to be quite universal—no matter what language the actors are speaking.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by John Travers on 1/30/09 at 2:17 pm
I really enjoyed this excellent, extremely informative interview. Keith Reamer is not only an experienced editor, but a very articulate speaker, and we can all learn a lot from his many wonderful insights into the craft. Thank you so much, MovieMaker! I learned a lot from this piece. It was very inspiring...and I can’t wait to see “Amreeka”!
- Comment by Michael Raadgep on 2/16/09 at 5:09 pm
As an active duty sailor and an aspiring editor I found this article to be inspiring and let me know that I probably am not editing enough even though I am waiting for a copy of FC Studio 2 I can still be practicing even if its just with iMovie. I love this craft!
- Comment by criminal defense lawyer in denver on 6/02/09 at 4:08 pm
It takes years of experience and knowledge to edit a film that deals with a sensitive subject like immigration. Keith Reamer has those qualities and i am confident that he will do a perfect job of editing ‘Amreeka’.
- Comment by Women's Electric Shavers on 7/14/09 at 1:22 am
What adds poignancy, to say nothing of dramatic heft, to this immigrant story is that it concerns a Palestinian mother and her teenage son, who leave their Israeli-occupied homeland for Illinois just as American forces invade Iraq. Few immigrants have been greeted with such fear and animosity as American “patriots” fail to distinguish between different Arab groups or to realize this family isn’t even Muslim.
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