DEARBORN — “Street Boss,” a film by Dearborn director/screenwriter Lance Khalid Kawas, is scheduled to be screened as the opening feature at the Detroit Windsor International Film Festival, which opens June 25.

The movie is one of two productions Kawas has just completed back-to-back.

“Street Boss,” based on a true story from the book “With Honor and Purpose,” by former FBI agent Phil Kerby, follows Kerby on his quest to bring down infamous Detroit mobster Tony Giacalone.

Shot in Saginaw, the film stars well-known actors Vincent Pastore (Goodfellas), Nicholas Turturro (I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry), Carmen Argenziano (Angels and Demons) and Robert Gallo (The Departed).

It premiered in Saginaw at a red carpet event last month.

A second Kawas film, “The Deported,” a comedy also starring Turturro, along with Talia Shire (The Godfather) and Michael Rapaport (Prison Break), is due out by the end of the year.

Kawas started writing screenplays in the mid-1990s, leaving behind a finance career he couldn’t stand.

“You go through something in your life and it just switches you,” he said.

The death of his mother of leukemia in 1993 spurred him to make the decision to live life to the fullest.

“She was young. She was 45,” Kawas said. “It shook me… she worked all her life and then she was just gone. I thought ‘Wow. Is this what life is about? Let me do something I enjoy’… Misery is a fuel to transcend the ordinary.”

Lance Kawas

Kawas, who grew up in Sierra Leone, where his Lebanese family owned video stores and theaters, was fascinated with film as a child.
After choosing to write full-time, despite the objections of family, he never looked back.

“Life is short. I’m 40. When I look back… I wasted so much time,” he said.

After years of writing award-winning screenplays, he got his first film deal in 2007, releasing a horror movie on DVD.

That opened the doors that would allow him to be able to release two films in 2009, with another — “The Violinist,” about a relationship between two Arab and Jewish law students — in the works.

“Consistency and tenacity really pay off in the end,” he said. “In this industry, it’s very difficult. It didn’t come easy.”

Kawas said “The Violinist” will serve to fight stereotypes, and represents the first time in film that “the Arab gets the girl… and saves the Jew.”

“They always depict us in a very wrong way,” he said. “You’re dealing with the story of an Arab and a Jew. The story of the century.”

After that’s released, Kawas said, his goal of becoming a great Arab American filmmaker will evolve into a goal of becoming a great filmmaker, period.

“You know what — I just want to be a good human being,” he said.

“Street Boss” is to be shown at 9 p.m. June 25 at Wayne State Law School, 471 West Palmer Avenue in Detroit, and again at 7 p.m. on June 27.

Short films by local Arab American director Sam Kadi and British-Yemeni director Bader Ben Hirsi are also scheduled to be shown at the four-day festival.

For more information, visit www.dwiff.org.