Ten years ago, without a sliver of experience, the Lebanese-born, Detroit-based Rola Nashef conceived what would become the short precursor to her acclaimed 2012 independent feature Detroit Unleaded. She had the idea to relate the quotidian trials of an Arab-American man working behind bulletproof glass at an inner-city filling station and had to figure out how to do it. “The short script,” she claims, “was the first time I’d written anything in my life.” After making the short, she spent a year with it on the festival circuit and another distributing it to universities for educational purposes, bucking the notion […]