Baba I’m Fine, a new short film by Pittsburgh filmmaker Karina Dandashi, opens with a scene of teenage heartbreak. A high school lunch bell rings, kicking off a tense classroom conversation where Avery (Michelle Do) cancels a Friday date with the film’s star, Sama (Hibah Abdellatif). But as the shot pushes in, Pittsburgh viewers might find their gaze drawn away from the drama to a map of the city and its three rivers, clipped to the classroom door.
“I added that there very specifically on purpose,” writer-director Dandashi tells Pittsburgh City Paper, among other Pittsburgh “easter eggs.” In the next scene, Sama rages in a music video-like fantasy sequence in her bedroom, but you can still spot a Steelers flag on the wall and a Pittsburgh tote bag hanging over the door.
A Pittsburgh native, Dandashi wanted Baba I’m Fine, which has its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film and TV Festival on March 8, to “capture the texture of Pittsburgh [and] the nostalgia that came with growing up here.”
Filmed in the city and featuring a majority local crew, Dandashi credits producers Stephen Turselli and Dan Duthie from Pittsburgh-based Solano Pictures for helping create “that sort of texture and feeling on the screen to give you a sense of a specific place.”
Baba I’m Fine “explores a father-daughter story close to my heart and hometown,” Dandashi writes in the film’s synopsis. The coming-of-age short reflects her “complicated” adolescent relationship with her own father, a Syrian Muslim who immigrated to attend the University of Pittsburgh. The family has deep roots in the region — “a melting pot for us,” Dandashi says — with her maternal grandfather immigrating from Ireland to work on the Pennsylvania Railroad.
“I think, for this film specifically, what I really wanted to capture is [a] feeling of frustration,” Dandashi tells City Paper. “It’s the idea that growing up, I felt like my immigrant parents knew everything about me, but also nothing about me.”
The 13-minute short takes the viewer on an odyssey of Pittsburgh when Sama’s father (Aladeen Tawfeek) attempts to cheer up his lovelorn daughter and salvage her Friday night. There’s an impromptu trip for dinner at Salem’s Market on Penn Ave. — a place Dandashi frequented growing up — and a drive up to the Mount Washington Overlook. If that seems like a cheesy dad spot, Dandashi confirms she was inspired by her own parents’ love for it, imagining the overlook as the kind of place the film’s father would take his daughter for a “big, bold grand gesture.”
For much of the film, it’s also unclear how much Sama’s father knows about her relationship with Avery, again reflective of what Dandashi describes as the “idyllic ‘ignorance is bliss’ relationship” she had with her own father growing up.
But as the evening in Baba I’m Fine progresses, the parental relationship softens, culminating in a “main character moment” for the film’s father, Dandashi says. There’s also a “little bit” of a visual reference to the famous Fort Pitt tunnel scene from another Pittsburgh-shot coming-of-age film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Dandashi cites Me and Earl and the Dying Girl as another favorite).
“I feel like a lot of times Arab dads, especially with queer stories, and especially through the Western lens, they’re seen as very one-dimensional. The strict dad or the mean dad,” Dandashi tells CP. “I wanted to create a dad that, despite the nuances and the misunderstandings between father and daughter … [is still] silly and goofy and soft, and bring the softboi lens to the Arab dad.”
Dandashi hopes the short will serve as proof of concept for her coming-of-age feature, Out of Water, also set in Pittsburgh. She’s unsure how the international audience at South by Southwest will react to seeing Pittsburgh and its “visual gems,” like the neon Heinz sign, on screen. For Pittsburgh audiences, Dandashi has also submitted Baba I’m Fine to local film festivals, and a Pittsburgh premiere is in the works.
“Hopefully people want to see more,” Dandashi says. “I hope to make future work in Pittsburgh, because I think it’s such a great city to put on the big screen. It has such a beautiful specificity to it … So it would be really special to make more work [here].”
Watch the trailer for Baba I’m Fine below:
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2025.
