"The Taqwacores" to screen at Sundance! Trailer now available on MTV!

Check out this terrific trailer for "The Taqwacores," courtesy MTV. It will screen soon at the Sundance Film Festival. Five chances to view it between January 24 and January 29. The Kominas will be there.

This makes me even more appreciative of Sundance, which screened Slingshot Hip-Hop, Jackie Salloum's film about Palestinian rap, in 2008.

Will Quentin Tarantino show up for an after-party, as he did for Slingshot?

Big congrats and mabrouk to all concerned, and particularly to Michael Muhammad Knight, the author of the novel The Taqwacores. And many other books, which all readers of this blawg should purchase and read. (Confession: I'm one of the inhabitants of Knight's Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America. It's cool to be part of MMK's vision of Islamic USA.

And of course, there are kufiyas, in the film, and in the trailer. This guy is the "West Coast Punk." From the trailer, it appears that he will be a quite interesting and provocative character in the film.


But the Riot Grrrl and the Queer Punk look promising too, eh?

More kufiyaspottings: DAM at Sundance

Tarantino
Originally uploaded by RJ Maccani

This is a great set of photos from Sundance, taken in January, featuring some of the stars of Jackie Salloum's film Slinsgshot Hiphop, which is about Palestinian rap. The guys from DAM and Mohammed of PR hang out with the likes of Quentin T., as well as important US hip-hop artists like M1 of Ded Prez and DJ Spooky and Chamillionaire (who sports a kufiya). Kufiyas abound! Check out all the photos.

Sundance: Palestinian Rap and Kufiyaspottings

I forgot to mention it previously, but Jackie Reece Salloum's much anticipated documentary on Palestinian rap, Slingshot Hip Hop, had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this week. It is receiving, well, pretty good reviews. Justin Chang had this to say about it in Variety (January 21): "Lively but roughly structured docu could've benefited from more performance footage, focusing instead on the challenges these young talents (hailing from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza) have faced on their rise to prominence, especially the geopolitical barriers that have hindered their mobility. Music-themed fests and Mideast programmers should make room on their playlists." Less positive was Eric D. Snider writing in Cinematical: "What the film lacks, though, is a cohesive theme or story line. An introduction to the Arab rap movement is all well and good, but it's not enough – an introduction is only the first part of a story, after all." In any case, I'm still eagerly looking forward to seeing the film for myself.

Meanwhile, thanks to Linda, who had to pour obsessively through dozens of photos to find it, we have another kufiyaspotting of Colin Farrell, who was photographed several times sporting the "Palestinian scarf" at the Sundance event for his film In Bruges.

Colin Farrell has been spotted before. But what was also of note was the fact that Mary Kate Olsen showed up at the In Bruges party also sporting a kufiya--one of those fancy purple ones. (If you want to be as obsessive as Linda and I, and see even more photos of Colin and Mary Kate in kufiyas, go here, check out the "events" photos, and then you've got to get to photo 146, and after.)

Celebrity Gossip wrote that she was looking stylish as always, but failed (as the fashion and gossip experts usually do) to identify the kufiya, simply calling it a "purple scarf."

Who next? After Mary Kate Olsen, it really could be almost anyone. According to Celebrity Gossip, "With the writers’ strike raging on, the Hollywood elite are growing bored. But there’s nothing like the Sundance Film Festival to give stars like Mary-Kate Olsen something to do." Get bored and wear kufiyas...