The Alkasem brothers, Riyad and Bashar, spend their childhood in Raqqa, the Syrian city that would later become the capital of ISIS. Riyad moves to the United States to study law and opens a restaurant, Café Rakka. But he finds himself confronted with the darker side of American freedoms: the hardscrabble life of a newly arrived immigrant, enduring bigotry, poverty, and loneliness. Bashar, meanwhile, stays in Syria, embarking on a brilliant legal career under the same corrupt Assad government that Riyad despises. Reluctant to abandon his comfortable (yet conflicted) life, he fails to perceive the threat of ISIS until it’s nearly too late. The Road from Raqqa is about America’s fraught but hopeful relationship to its own immigrants, and the toll of dictatorship and war on everyday families.