Is hip hop the language needed for Israeli-Palestinian peace?

posted on: Feb 22, 2016

Howard Gensier

Philly.com

Art is sort of the opposite of politics. The latter divides. The former unites.

Such was the result at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

“Junction 48” is a an Arabic language hip-hop film starring mostly Palestinians. It was filmed in Lod, near Tel Aviv, and directed by Israeli-American Udi Aloni.

And it won Berlin’s Panorama Audience Award for best fiction film.

”The movie tells a Palestinian story… the Palestinians are the subject,” Aloni said at a post-award screening. The Jews who get the most attention are rival rappers, reported forward.com, ultra-nationalists who try to bait the Arab rappers with racist talk – while they are all sitting in a hot tub together. Unlike the Israeli police in the film, the Jewish rappers are “evil but not dangerous.”

“It’s still a revolutionary movie because it doesn’t talk about the way we Palestinians are usually represented in the world,” actress Samar Qupty told Reuters.

“We are representing ourselves by the new generation without trying to prove anything to anyone, with our ‘goods’ and ‘bads’.”

Source: www.philly.com