Reflections on Bronx Princess

Eid Mubarak to everyone!

Bronx Princess is an independent film that premiered last night on PBS at 10 p.m. If you missed it, you can watch it online for a month starting today.

During a Qiyam I planned for the youth at my Masjid this past Ramadan, we held a discussion with about fifteen 11 to 16 year olds about the American-Muslim identity. To say the least, the open discussion ended with the girls on their feet arguing with each other in small groups about who was American, who wasn't, the definition of an American, of American-Muslim. Not much of a conclusion was made.

Rocky Otoo and her search and struggle to find her identity is not a secluded story - just one that you don't hear very often. Bronx Princess was about the discussion of identity and who we are in America (mostly from the point of view of American born children of immigrants).

Though I felt the movie transitioned too quickly between the events of Rocky's summer, filmmakers Yoni Brook & Musa Syeed did a great job telling her story and captured touching & intimate moments with her mother especially as well as with her father.

Bronx Princess also brought back memories of the first (and only) time I went to Syria and the culture shock I got from being in a strange country where my parents grew up and I had no clue about. It wasn't until the end of my trip and after I left till I truly understand, appreciate and was able to love Syria which in turn helped me understand who I am today.

Hopefully the girls at the Masjid can watch this movie (found here), relate to it and and help them understand their identity as well.

Why we need an American-Muslim Tyler Perry

Hands down, Tyler Perry is cool.

The first Tyler Perry movie I saw was Diary of a Mad Black Woman. While I watched the making of the movie, I realized that this was Perrys’ first film ever. And in my opinion, his best one yet. It was a combination of a drama, comedy, love story and family movie all in one. At the same time, he promoted the idea of the ideal Black Christian family.

Perry's movies make it clear that he knows what he wants as far as portraying the ideal Black Christian community – and using his movies to give people that positive image of what to attain. Besides his TV sitcoms, I have yet to see a Tyler Perry movie without a church scene in it – which is usually the same scene where the family’s troubles all unravel and fix themselves – all because they had trust in God.

No matter what the problem is, in the end, the church is where their problems are solved.

So basically Perry is legit because he's proud of who he is and he is using movies to affirm his identity, and that is something that we, as American Muslims can learn from. This is so we don’t not push away our identity, but to embrace it.

-ScreenRighter with help from FilmMaqam

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

Movie Review: "Le Grande Voyage"

If you've never seen Ismael Ferroukhi's independent film, "Le Grand Voyage,” this is one you don't want to miss. Le Grand Voyage is one of those movies that I felt really related to our everyday lives as Muslims living in the west. In today's world, you hear key phrases like "clash of civilizations" in reference to immigrants and their lives in the west. This independent film gives us a story of two people going through that “clash of civilizations”. Ferroukhi does an amazing job in showing the complex relationship grow between the father and son, a father that was a good religious man and a son that is at heart, a good person, but in his own world – or really living in the “dunya”.

The film depicts a Moroccan immigrant who takes his French-born son with him to the annual pilgrimage to Makkah, or the Hajj. While the pilgrimage itself is a spiritual journey, the trip that the father and son take together is a spiritual journey in itself and shows the immense generation gap between them. Hamza Yusuf once said that a long time ago the trials and tribulations used to be on the trip to hajj and it was a relief to arrive; now the trials and tribulations begin when we arrive at hajj. Yusuf’s quote is a reflection on how the father says how he wants the trip with his son to purify him before reaching Makkah. Once the father and son arrive in Makkah, the atmosphere of the movie is calm with the images of millions of pilgrims walking towards the Kaabah.

It’s clear, from the moment that the son, Reda, who is in his 20s, gets in the car with his father, driving through several countries to get to Makkah, Saudi Arabia; this may be the first time in his life that they really share any father son time. While the father is a depicted as a pious man, he seems to have never taught his son anything about his religion, Islam. Throughout the movie, the father speaks in Arabic and the son in French, giving an example how people may not know how to integrate the cultures of the west and east. As a result, a clear generation gap occurs.

The movie captures your attention with the twists and turns of the father and son’s relationship and how they learn from each other – though it’s mostly the son learning from the father. More than anything, this movie is a reminder to the younger generation, the duty we have towards respecting our elders and understanding our religion in order to comprehend and be proud of who we are.

-ScreenRighter