What: Slingshot Hip Hop, a documenary film about Palestinian hip-hop music
When: Thu Feb 11, 2010, 7 – 8:30pm
Where: Rackham Amphitheater (915 E Washington Street)
Cost: Free and open to the public (Part of UM’s Black History Month celebrations)
The screening will be followed by a discussion led by Amer Ahmed, Associate Director of University of Michigan’s Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs (MESA).
Join the event on Facebook.
Click here to read the preview and review of this film from an earlier screening at UM.
Slingshot Hip Hop, a documentary film about Palestinian hip-hop music, is directed by Jackie Reem Salloum (who received her BFA from Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti). The film was nominated for Grand Jury Prize in the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. (Click here for a detailed review of the film by Maureen Clare Murphy.)
Salloum spent five years making Slingshot Hip Hop, at times raising money by working at her parents’ ice cream shop in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Her production company, Fresh Booza Productions, refers to this – booza being the Arabic word for “ice cream”.
After the film screening, film-maker Jackie Salloum will also lead a discussion about the film.
Featured in the documentary is the Palestinian rap group DAM (Da Arabian MCs).
You can check out an interview with Salloum in which she is discussing the film, by clicking here. You can also check out a trailer for the film.
A discussion which took place some time ago at Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse in Baltimore about this film, has this to say:
Slingshot Hip Hop braids together the stories of young Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and inside Israel as they discover hip hop and employ it as a tool to surmount divisions imposed by occupation and poverty. From internal checkpoints and separation walls to gender norms and generational differences, this is the story of young people crossing the borders that separate them.
As readers of the erstwhile Arts Lounge are well aware, Ann Arbor has a thriving hip-hop culture. This will be a very interesting film to see, and will be eagerly anticipated. As Eric Snider wrote in January in a Sundance Review on the Cinematical blog:
When you hear that Slingshot Hip Hop is a documentary about Palestinian rap groups, you probably have the same thought I had: “What, that old subject again? Why can’t filmmakers come up with something original?”
Just kidding. One of the joys of a film festival is seeing documentaries on unusual topics that you had never considered before, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who didn’t know Palestine had even one rap group, let alone a major hip hop movement. First-time feature filmmaker Jackie Reem Salloum (an American with Palestinian and Syrian roots) knows that our curiosity will be piqued simply by hearing the subject matter […]
Incidentally, this film is sort of a parallel project to UM graduate student Vanessa Diaz’s film Cuban Hip-hop, about which I blogged in the erstwhile Arts Lounge some time ago. (Just as Jackie Salloum went to Palestine and made this documentary on Palestinian hip-hop, Vanessa Diaz had gone to Cuba and shot a documentary on Cuban hip-hop.)
