Elie El Choufany for All-American Story

For as long as I can remember, I dreamed of becoming a storyteller in Hollywood, a place where the impossible could happen, where people came from every corner of the world to create something bigger than themselves.

My own story began far from Los Angeles, in Lebanon, where my parents owned a small VHS store above our underground apartment. That basement wasn’t just our home, it was also the neighborhood shelter during Lebanon’s long civil war. For more than a decade, the war tore through our lives. Fear and violence became a kind of second language.

One of my earliest memories is learning how to befriend the dark. Not the soft quiet of bedtime, but the thick, airless dark that came when the power flickered out. To reach the bathroom at the far end of the basement, I had to slip like a shadow past neighbors and strangers sleeping shoulder to shoulder, past women whispering grief into the silence. In the kitchen, I’d find my mother crouched in the dark, hiding the last banana so I’d have something to eat the next day.
And finally, the bathroom, where my siblings stuffed tissue into their ears to block the thunder of bombs.

That was the game I learned as a child: how to move through darkness, past sorrow, hunger, fear… just to reach a door.

When raids kept us trapped, my grandmother told me stories. She painted Lebanon as a paradise, “the Switzerland of the Middle East.” She spoke of the Phoenicians and the sacred Phoenix bird rising from ashes. These tales lit my imagination, even as I sensed her faith in them had faded.

By the time I was five, my grandmother’s stories no longer held me. One night, restless, I wandered through the darkened apartment while everyone slept. That’s when I heard my aunties whispering down the hall, their voices carrying news of another tragedy that had struck our family. I shrank into a corner to avoid being seen, and that’s where I spotted them: a set of keys I recognized instantly. Keys that had been hidden from me since the day I was born. I waited until the voices faded, then slipped down the hallway. I eased open the front door, crept up the impossibly tall cement stairs, step after step, my heart racing.

And then, I was outside for the first time.

The night air was sharp and cool, alive with scents I’d never known. For a breathless moment, I felt weightless, until the shelling began again. My body knew what to do. I ran. I ran to the only place that felt safe. I unlocked the VHS store, and hid inside.

Within those walls, I found more than safety. I discovered possibility. Each tape I played wasn’t just a movie, it was a portal.

In front of that flickering screen, I was no longer Lebanese, no longer the silent child. I was Dr. David Bowman, fearlessly piloting through galaxies. Indiana Jones, sprinting through collapsing temples. Peter Pan, soaring past rooftops to Neverland.

The VHS store gave me what war never could: freedom. Freedom from basements, from labels that divided us: Christian, Muslim, neighbor, enemy. Stories that built a home larger than Lebanon. A home not bound by walls or borders, but made of light on a screen, of voices and music and images that carried me into worlds far beyond my own.

Sitting cross-legged on that cool tile floor, I decided: I wanted to create those worlds. I wanted to give others the same escape, the same hope.

Decades passed, but the war never ended. It only returned in new forms. I was now in my early twenties, and the violence had turned inward, not because of religion, but because of who I was. Because of my queerness. Because I wasn’t Arab enough, man enough, good enough.

Before faith slipped from me as it had from my grandmother, I kissed my parents goodbye and boarded a plane to Los Angeles. This wasn’t a trip I would return from. I was leaving for good.

I was running from a country that had turned against me, a place that persecuted me for who I was and made it clear there was no longer space for me within its borders. The hardest part wasn’t the fear of what lay ahead, but the ache of what I was leaving behind: the faces of my parents at the gate, my mother’s hand pressed against the glass, my father’s silence heavy with everything he couldn’t say. And my sibling, left behind to lose, once again, something else that Lebanon had stolen from them.

At the airport, the customs officer asked why I’d come. “To tell stories,” I said, though what I meant was: I was applying for a new home. Behind me stretched a country that had been both birthplace and prison. Ahead was a country that hadn’t yet decided if I belonged

My first room was a mattress on the floor of a sublet, a window overlooking a billboard tallying lives lost to smoking, and a corner stacked with scripts I couldn’t afford to print. On the mirror, I taped a photo of the VHS shop, a reminder of why I was here.

In Lebanon, survival had taught me silence. But in America, silence read as absence. Here, I had to learn to speak louder, clearer, to insist my story mattered.

It wasn’t easy. My accent felt like a spotlight I couldn’t dim. My name split in people’s mouths: “Ellie? Eli? El-ee?”…until I decided to keep “Elie” and make the room learn it. But inside, I wasn’t sure who that was anymore.

I began sanding myself down. Changing clothes, softening my accent, laughing at jokes that didn’t land. Soon my reflection felt borrowed, my gestures rehearsed. Invisibility had returned, not in a basement, but in rooms where being myself felt risky.

And yet, late at night, staring at the VHS photo taped to the mirror, I could feel the real me pressing against the seams, waiting for a chance to break through.

That chance came slowly. A conversation, a class, a story I told without polishing. Each time I risked revealing myself, people leaned closer. I realized erasure had no power; the power was in truth.

So I stopped writing for permission and started writing for honesty. Nights after work, I wrote the hallway from memory, the bodies lined shoulder to shoulder, my mother hiding the last banana, the keys glinting in a corner. I wrote in two languages when one wouldn’t hold the feeling. A child crossing a room became my car chase; a boy turning a key became my third-act twist.

I told myself no one would ever read it. Too Lebanese for America, too queer for home, too quiet for Hollywood. But the pages felt like oxygen.

Once I was finished, I sent it out into the world, quietly, almost as an afterthought. And then, something I never expected happened: the script placed in competitions and even won a few of them. Festival after festival, the story I thought too small to matter began to gather awards and attention. The very thing I believed would make me invisible became the reason people saw me.

Each recognition was proof that authenticity travels farther than polish. That the story I carried out of a basement in Lebanon could reach strangers across the world.

Opportunities didn’t crash through the door all at once, but they came, slowly. A producer asked for the script. A friend staged a table read. A student told me, “I didn’t know we were allowed to write like that.” And I heard myself answer, “We are now.”

That was the lesson I couldn’t learn while sanding myself down. Reinvention isn’t erasure; it’s assembly. I didn’t need to choose between being immigrant or dreamer, exile or creator, invisible child or loud storyteller. I could hold all of them, arranged together. And on the page, my page, they finally coexisted.

America, like me, is defined by contradiction. It is both invitation and interrogation, a land of wide-open possibility and tightly guarded borders.

When I first arrived, I felt the promise so clearly, the sense that if I worked hard enough, I could belong, I could stitch a life larger than the one I left behind. And in many ways, I have. In less than a decade, Los Angeles became my home away from home. I’ve built a career in film and television, a dream born in the flicker of a VHS screen. I’ve also found love, the kind I could never have lived openly in Lebanon. These are gifts America gave me, and they are real.

But gifts are never the whole story. Alongside them came shadows. In recent years, the exclusion I once fled has begun to whisper here too, like an old ghost trailing me across an ocean.
Questions of belonging rise again, unspoken but felt. Whether in the uncertainty of a new law, the silence of a room, or the suspicion in a stranger’s glance. The safety I once believed unshakable sometimes quivers, as though my place could be undone not by anything I do, but by the shifting mood of the country itself.

That is America’s paradox: it has been the stage where my wildest dreams unfolded, and at the same time, the place where my belonging and my worth are still conditional, fragile, debated. The door that once felt open and waiting for me now feels heavier, guarded more tightly, though the light inside, the dream itself, still glows.

And so I live in that tension: the hope and the risk, side by side, outside of me and within me. Maybe that’s the real story: that people like me keep choosing to believe in possibility, even when the ground beneath us feels unsteady. That every step forward carries both the thrill of hope and the ache of rejection, and yet… still we walk.

The farther I walked from Lebanon, the closer I carried it. And in America, I didn’t just chase Hollywood. I rebuilt the sanctuary I once found in the glow of a television screen. Only this time, I wasn’t the boy escaping into someone else’s story. I was the one creating the world, holding the keys, inviting others in.