Exlusive Interview: New Muslim Cool
May 22nd, 2009Jennifer Taylor is the filmmaker behind New Muslim Cool.
The film will debut on PBS stations across the country in June.
We recently interviewed Taylor to find out how the concept of the film started and what drove her to pursue the topic.
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If you could tell us a little about yourself and how you got into film making… and then how you ended up making this documentary. Was there something specific that sparked your interest in this topic?
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, at a time when both countries were transitioning to elected governments from the military dictatorships of the ’70s and ’80s. Watching my friends and relatives in those countries 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.
Flash forward to the period right after 9/11: I was working as a producer at San Francisco’s PBS affiliate, KQED, where I was 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. There, an incredibly diverse group of young Muslim men and women — some of them converts and some of them born into the faith — 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 had a decade earlier — to coalesce as a community after a terrible event, while making new space 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. Then I put together a team that included my two amazing co-producers, Kauthar Umar and Hana Siddiqi, raised some initial funds and started filming.
Many people might think the title of the documentary is about Muslim artists in general, but then find out it’s only about this one particular performer.. what made you decide to do such an intimate look at his life?
At first we planned to make a “survey” film about American Muslim youth culture, a sort of ensemble piece featuring several intersecting characters on the road with a small Muslim hip-hop label. We imagined that 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 — were using new technologies to bring together faith and pop culture.
All of those cultural themes still run through the finished film, but once we decided to focus on Hamza Pérez 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 Hamza and his wife Rafiah’s day-to-day and spiritual life became the real heart of the film.
Did you have certain thoughts about Muslims when taping this that were changed/challenged over the course of your filming?
I really didn’t know any Muslims when I started the film and did not really have a very clear picture of the community. As I started learning more the first thing that struck me was how diverse the community is, and how there is no one monolith. That only deepened as the filming process went on.
What obstacles did you face?
Funding is the number one obstacle for any independent filmmaker. So apart from that the big challenge was to make sure that, as we were filming at regular intervals over three years, we were capturing a story that would hold together and have a clear trajectory.
It turned out a lot of the movement in the film is internal and not so overtly dramatic. The film is about spiritual growth, trust, love, redemption, family, community, and forgiveness — and those are very beautiful processes but can be hard to capture in a visual medium like film.
We could have made something more sensationalistic but that would have been disrespectful and dishonest and I would never have broken the trust Hamza and everyone else put in us — so we ended up with a pretty quiet and reflective film, but one that I think we all feel reflects what truly was happening.
What is your favorite part of this documentary?
The family scenes with Hamza’s mom and grandmother, and with him and Rafiah and the kids. I think they speak to how universal the story truly is.
What message do you hope people will take from this film?
At the beginning of the filming process I’m not sure any of us — the crew or the people featured in the film — anticipated how deeply we would end up exploring the most elemental processes that make us human: the search for some form of faith, for goodness, for ways to maintain hope, find forgiveness and fall in love.
So my main hope is that people see Hamza, Rafiah, and all the other people in the film as humans first, just like themselves, whoever they happen to be. The film is of course about specific community issues and themes relating to American Muslims, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, youth, working people — but at the end of the day it’s a universal story about how each of us in our own way can try to be the best person possible.
For other young women who aspire to get into the film business, what advice can you give them?
Start by making a few short pieces that you can do well from start to finish and don’t try to do something too big at the beginning. Look for more experienced producers for whom you might be able to work and don’t be afraid or discouraged if you have to do a lot of repetitive or uninteresting work along the way.
Filmmaking is actually very tedious so just stick with it and keep moving forward bit by bit. And always remember that it’s not about you but the people who have entrusted you to tell their stories.
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[...] can read more about it and watch the trailer here, and you can check also out the Hijabtrendz exclusive interview with the film’s director. Bookmark [...]