Hijabtrendz.com Exclusive!

Check out the interview by Mariam Sobh with Iman Zawahry, a Muslim Filmmaker!

http://hijabtrendz.com/2009/03/30/hijabtrendz-exclusive-iman-zawahry/

New Muslim Cool: Filmmaker's Statement

“NEW MUSLIM COOL”

By Jennifer Maytorena Taylor

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 on PBS (Check local listings)

Filmmaker’s Statement

I had an accidental start as a documentary filmmaker. Injuries ended my modern-dance career before it really began, and during my recuperation I spent a few years teaching in New York City and San Francisco Head Start and special-education classrooms. I started to learn that everybody has a story worth listening to, if you can just take the time and really open your ears and mind. And “normal” is usually in the eye of the beholder.

I alternated those teaching gigs with time spent living in Brazil and Argentina, as both countries were transitioning to elected governments from the military dictatorships of the ’70s and ’80s. Watching my friends and relatives emerge from the trauma of those years, I was struck by how powerfully each country’s pop culture was helping people express themselves collectively and individually.

Flashing forward to the period right after 9/11 — I was working as a producer at San Francisco’s PBS affiliate, KQED, when offered the chance to do some pieces on South Asian youth in the Bay Area. In the course of my research I discovered a thriving Muslim hip-hop scene in Oakland, where an incredibly diverse group of young men and women from both convert and born-Muslim backgrounds were collaborating to create a culture that was both expressing their faith and reaffirming their American-ness.

It struck me that these young artists were using pop culture in much the same way those Brazilian and Argentine musicians were doing a decade before — to coalesce as a community after a terrible event, while making new spaces for individual expression that would further the evolution of a shared national identity.

Thinking of other seminal cultural and musical moments, I came up with a be-bop inspired title, New Muslim Cool; put together a team that includes my two amazing co-producers Kauthar Umar and Hana Siddiqi; raised some initial funds and started filming.

At first we thought we would make a “survey” film about American Muslim youth culture, a sort of ensemble piece with several intersecting characters on the road with a small Muslim hip-hop label. The film would explore the diversity and dynamism of this young American community, examine hip-hop as the lingua franca of youth everywhere, and show how young American Muslims — like so many other people — are using new technologies to bring faith and pop culture together.

All of those cultural themes still run through the finished film. But once we decided to focus on Hamza Perez and his family and community in Pittsburgh, the project took on a whole other life and deeper meaning. Hip-hop culture became less the focus of the film and more the context, and the real heart of the film became Hamza’s and his wife Rafiah’s day-to-day and spiritual life.
We followed Hamza, Rafiah and their community as they faced the ups and downs of life through three years. They confronted everyday challenges like getting to know the in-laws and having to cope with Rafia giving birth by C-section, and not-so-everyday challenges like possibly being under some form of surveillance that nobody could quite figure out. Often these disparate circumstances were laid directly on top of each other, so in the space of two minutes during an interview Rafiah would wonder about a mysterious panel van parked outside her house and then ask who forgot to put the lid on the peanut butter. It was a little surreal sometimes, but so is real life when you really think about it.

At the outset of this project when we were thinking it would be a cool and clever film about hip-hop culture, I’m not sure any of us — crew and characters alike — anticipated how deeply we would end up exploring the most elemental processes that make us human: the need so many of us have for some form of faith, to seek goodness, maintain hope, find forgiveness, fall in love. But that’s part of the magic of making long-form documentaries. You just never know where you’ll end up. And wherever that is you’ve been profoundly changed, for the better by the journey.

-Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, Director/Producer/Writer.

Taylor's Filmmaker Statement was originally posted for PBS's POV.

"New Muslim Cool: will be the opening night feature on the acclaimed PBS series P.O.V. on June 23rd. Check out local listings: http://www.pbs.org/pov/tvschedule.php

Bugs Life Wisdom

The short scene from A Bugs Life I want to discuss starts with a leaf falling in the middle of the long line of ants that leads to a huge pile of food. The colony was gathering this food for the grasshoppers. The falling leaf lands in front of one of the ants and all of the sudden, this ant couldn't see the line and didn't know what to do... he starts to freak out.

The Queen Ant comes to the rescue, bringing with her a Specialist in this crisis area. The Specialist quickly calms the ant down and tells him it wasn't a big deal, they were going to go around the leaf. The Specialist slowly leads the ant around the leaf right back into the line.

That's amazing. This short scene in the cartoon can be compared to people who don't know what to do when a small obstacle is put in front of them. And while it may seem large (the size of the leaf compared to the ants), in reality, it is really a simple solution.

However, the scene also portrays a specialist leading the way back to the goal - getting back in line to put the food for the grasshoppers. It is interesting that sometimes we go through this as well. We may get off the right path because we reach a seemingly difficult obstacle or obstruction, but once we take other's advice or look at things from a different perspective, we can see that it's not that difficult to get back on track to attain our goal, inshaAllah.

-ScreenRighter

Want to be a Filmmaker?

By ScreenRighter

The following is an article based on an interview by ScreenRighter with Murad Amayrah, a film maker, producer and director. He is also head of productions for the Mass Media Foundation.

Murad Amayrah has simple advice for aspiring film makers: Grab a camera and make a film.

It’s probably going to suck, he said, but you’ll be able to discover your strength and weaknesses and build your skills from there.

Amayrah said there are three things that you need to worry about when making a film: Your story, your story, and your story.

Just pull out your laptop or pen and start writing, he said. Then shoot the film.

"Even if the movie has bad camera work, if you have a good solid story, then people will watch your movie," he said.

If you really want to learn the rules of filmmaking, go to film school, Amayrah advises, because “you have to know the rules of film making - so that you can break them.”

"Show [your movie] to people, take their criticism," he said. "You might discover that you're good at one or two things but not so good at another."

Another mistake is when people want to go into film school without knowing what it really entails, he said.

Find out which schools let you experiment, and remember that making movies doesn’t have to mean following Hollywood plots frequent with sex and violence.

"I personally do not believe you have to compromise your values to get into the industry," he said.

He points to “Paradise Now” and “Crash,” as major films with good morals.

He also cautions Muslims who want to use film making as a form of dawah to focus foremost on the art forms true purpose, which is to tell stories.

"If you want to do dawah, he says, "Go do a dawah table.”

Muslim’s often have a different perspective on life that can help them offer something that other’s cant, he said. Have a different perspective on life, on stories, for example, so they bring to the table something different, he said.

One example he presents is a story from hadith or Quran or even a story about a girl who struggled to wear the Hijab.

“To us that’s something that’s very standard, but to our audience that we're trying to reach, that is a unique story, they've never heard of a story like that,” he said.

Movies with a good story do get a chance to get to Hollywood, he said. On the other hand, no buying power is a reason Muslim filmmakers have a hard time making it big.

"Muslims don't buy Islamic films, we bootleg them," he said, pointing to the gay community as an example of how to be supportive.

"Any time that they made a movie with a gay character, they bought it off the shelf," he said, adding that major Hollywood companies are not going to buy movies that people won't buy.

He points to filmmaker Mustafa Akkad, who made “The Message” but lost money on it and had to make “Halloween.”

"It’s very frustrating when your own community is not supporting us," he said.

New Muslim Cool Trailer...

The New Muslim Cool Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leMWi2asGPw

"American East" Movie Review

If you want to make a social point in a movie, there should be two rules of thumb.

a) Entertainment Value
b) Not making the message overbearing

Do not continue if you do not want to be spoiled…

AmericanEast is an attempt at mainstreaming American Muslims and attempts to portray the struggles Muslims face in the United States. In my opinion, they overdid it and never established a coherent plot. And on top of that, I found that the characters had no depth and some were cartoonish caricatures.

The main character, Mustafa Marzoke, is an easy going immigrant from Egypt that owns a Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles in a (fictional?) neighborhood called “Little Arabia”. He is an archetypal jolly “just happy to be in America” immigrant with a heart of gold. His character reminded me of the way Russian immigrants were portrayed in the early 1980’s.

Mustafa gets detained at the airport in the beginning of the movie while looking for his son Mohammed. One can understand being afraid of losing a child, but Mohammed was about 13 or 14 and Mustafa was screaming through the airport in search of him as if here a toddler. It just came off as a weird over reaction. But there was no reason for the police to jump and grab him either. The entire sequence was strange. By the way, Mustafa was picking up his cousin Sabir who’d come from Egypt to marry Mustafa’s sister Salwah in an arranged marriage.

Meanwhile, Mohammed, Mustafa’s young son was having some type of crisis of faith and explicitly told Mustafa that he no longer wanted to be Muslim. However, the movie never resolved that that angle was left.

Leila Marzouke, was Mustafa’s dope smoking/dawah giving daughter. She had a scene that was like an infomercial in which she is talking about Islam and Middle Eastern history with her friend while smoking marijuana. That seemed to be her only purpose in the movie. Came off as very forced and as if the movie was preaching to the audience.

Sam, was Mustafa’s Jewish partner in his business. They really wanted you to know that he was Jewish. He had an Israeli flag on his car, wore a Star of David ring and yarmulke.
Salwah Marzouke, Mustafa’s sister, was a nurse that styled hair in the back of her brother’s restaurant and was arranged to marry her cousin Sabir. However she did not like him and they did not get married. But the cousin was never informed (at least not on camera) and the story was dropped. Salwah was also interested in a doctor at her hospital who was not Muslim.
Omar Nasser was an aspiring actor that drove a cab owned by Mustafa. As an Arab, he was only offered parts portraying terrorists. While Omar was getting coffee, someone thought he had explosives in his bag and confronted him. Omar got angry and jokingly told him that he was going to blow up the place to scare him. However, the employee called the police and Omar was arrested for a few hours causing him to miss an audition for a non-terrorist part. This causes him to snap and later he takes his co-workers hostage and is eventually shot by a sniper. The movie was already struggling, but at this point it went completely over the cliff.

Then there was Murad, an angry anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist that cursed like a sailor. I suspect he was there to provide some comic relief, but he was simply annoying.

Every extra in the movie was a bigot that was irrationally afraid of Arabs. The people in the airport. The FBI agents. Omar’s racist co-workers. The newscasters. The customers in coffee shops. The people working in the coffee shops. Everyone. I understand that they wanted to make a point about the struggles of Muslim Arab-Americans, but you can’t make it so blatant that it takes away from the story. And most of all..it must be entertaining.


-Tariq Nelson is an activist that lives in the Washington, DC area. This post was taken from his blog: tariqnelson.com . You can find the blog post here: http://www.tariqnelson.com/2009/01/americaneast/