
A story of struggle
THE final season of comedy-drama series Mo is out now on Netflix.
Starring Mo Amer, who is the show's co-creator alongside stand-up comedian Ramy Youssef, the production follows a Palestinian refugee living in Houston, Texas, who is seeking asylum and citizenship in the United States.
Picking up from the first episode's finale, the latest season is set to follow Mo being stranded across the border, due to being mistakenly transported to Mexico in the back of a truck driven by thieves, leaving him stranded and struggling to return to Houston before his family's asylum hearing due to being a stateless refugee without a passport.
The series has received critical acclaim for being one of the first major American television shows to portray a Palestinian-American refugee as the protagonist and highlighting the ethnic diversity within Houston, and currently holds a 100 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
'I'm thankful to continue to tell a universal story of struggle that relates to so many refugees and millions of underrepresented humans trying to be seen around the globe,' Mo, who became a US citizen in 2009 after a 20-year wait, said in an interview .
'It takes a tremendous amount of patience and it is gruelling. It's emotionally, physically, mentally gruelling to go through such a thing,' he added.
Writer and executive producer Harris Danow stated that the crew behind the series have decided to not tackle the genocidal acts on Palestine that were caused by the October 7 attacks in 2023, which were only recently put to an end by a ceasefire announcement, believing that it will distract from humanising and representing Palestinian individuals and their rich culture.
'The Israel-Palestine of it all is something we intentionally avoided in season one,' Harris said.
'Not because of the politics, but because the only thing people really know about Palestinians from the outside is their relationship to Israel and the occupation,' he added.
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