DUBAI: Saudi-born actress Dina Shihabi stars in “PH-1,” a tech-driven political thriller directed by and starring Mark Kassen, set for release in the US on April 10.
Los Angeles-based Shihabi took to Instagram this week to share a trailer for the movie by reposting a video shared by Santa Monica-based film and media company Buffalo 8.
Abubakar Salim, Shihabi, Vinessa Shaw and Jesse L. Martin round out the cast.
In the film, Kassen stars as a politician with a promising future who is “held hostage by an unseen captor and forced to watch his reputation collapse in real time as social and traditional media weaponize speculation, spin and viral outrage. As his public identity unravels, he races to uncover who is orchestrating the attack, and why,” according to the film’s official logline.
Much of the action takes place in the politician’s luxury penthouse over the course of one night.
The film will open on April 10 for a limited run in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., followed by a North American digital release on major streaming platforms beginning May 8.
Shihabi spent part of her childhood in Dubai. Her father is Saudi-Norwegian journalist Ali Shihabi, and her mother Nadia is half-Palestinian and half German-Haitian.
She moved to the US in 2007 and was the first Middle Eastern-born woman to be accepted to the Juilliard School and New York University graduate acting program. She began appearing in short films in 2010, but her big break came in 2017 with the role of Hanin in the series “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.”
Her previous projects include the Netflix limited series “Painkiller,” which was released in 2023. The miniseries, which focuses on the origins and aftermath of America’s opioid epidemic, was based on the book “Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic,” by Barry Meier, and a New Yorker article, “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” written by Patrick Radden Keefe.
