Coming Around

Coming Around follows 28-year-old Eman as she weighs the decision to come out to her devout Muslim mother. She is a second-generation Palestinian-Egyptian who lives in Brooklyn. Having grown up in Columbia, with her mother and sister, the three women share a tight-knit bond that Eman desperately wants to maintain. But despite being a scholar and visibly “out” among her queer Muslim friends, Eman sits uncomfortably in silence when it comes to her mother. To postpone coming out, she makes the difficult choice to marry her current boyfriend, Q, to give the appearance of strictly cis-hetero relationship interests. The main arc of the film is one epic drive from St. Louis airport to Columbia on the evening that Eman comes out of the closet to her mom, and the film unfolds between that drive and the events that lead up to it, crisscrossing past, present, and future timelines within a frame of non-linearity.