A panel concluding the first Toronto Palestine Film Festival discussed the history of Palestinian cultural resistance through art last Saturday morning. Drawing on Jackie Salloum’s award-winning documentary and festival closer Slingshot Hip Hop, discussion focused on the emergence of new art forms as means of cultural resistance.
Salloum’s film tells the interrelated stories of young Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel as they discover hip hop as a way to overcome divisions fostered by occupation and poverty.
Based in New York, Salloum is a filmmaker whose pop-infused work focuses on challenging the stereotypes of Arabs in the media. “I chose to merge pop-culture and politics in my work, because there is a fine line where you don’t want to sound preachy. If you hold a sign and scream at peoples faces it’s not very effective […] I started using things people were comfortable with, gumball machines, collages, and toys,” said Salloum.
Sling Shot Hip Hop took nearly four years to develop mainly due to troubles finding financers who were not keen to fund the project about Palestinian struggles excluding their Israeli counterparts.
Rinaldo Walcott, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at OISE described hip hop’s mobilizing potential. “One of the things that is really interesting about hip hop as an art form, is that every time you think hip hop is dead, it raises its head somewhere else and appears to be relevant again.”
Rafeef Ziadah, who is a PhD candidate in Political Science at York University, cited the Black Consciousness Movement in as a source of inspiration for her own activism. Ziadah, also a local spoken word artist and a well-known Toronto Palestine activist and performer, said Palestinians are fighting for their basic human dignity, through art and culture.
