Loading ...This filmmaker wants you to see what breakdancing in Yemen is like
Scenes from the Arab Spring flash across the screen at the start of the new documentary “Shake the Dust.” But this film isn’t about politics or a revolution.
“Our story doesn’t make front-page news,” says the young narrator, a 12-year-old named Karim who grew up in a Kampala slum.
Images of violence dissolve to reveal a different sides of war-torn and poverty-stricken worlds. Weaving through the streets and ghettos of Uganda, Colombia, Cambodia and Yemen — where filming took place days before mass protests and rioting broke out in the Middle East — the documentary depicts the lives of b-boys and b-girls who share a universal culture of hip hop. These are kids and young adults who have lost their parents, who were born with easy access to drugs and gangs and who have witnessed poverty firsthand. But for them, director Adam Sjoberg says, breakdancing isn’t an escape; it’s a way of life.
“For some of them, it substitutes religion in a good way. For some of them, it’s a way of feeling empowered. For some of them, it’s a way of self-identifying, of saying ‘I came from this place that most people think of as this terrible slum, but I also come from this beautiful culture called hip hop.’”
Source: www.pbs.org