Freedom of expression and the powers of suppression meet head-on in Slingshot Hip Hop, Jackie Reem Salloum’s gritty and infectious documentary about young Palestinian rap artists in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank finding their voice and struggling to be heard. After the film’s premiere screening at the Festival, Salloum took part in a Q&A, along with hip-hop artists Mahmoud Jrere, Tamer Nafar, Suhell Nafar, Mohammed Al-Farra, and Abeer, who preceded the discussion with a free-form Arabic rap performance.

Q: (To Abeer) In the movie you stayed underground as a rap artist. Now that the film is out, how has your family reacted?

Abeer: Any woman, no matter what she wants to do, is always going to be rejected because of her gender. So it wasn’t very easy on my family at all. But after working very hard on it and trying to explain to them what it means to me – they respected it.

Q: It seemed that many of you had a lot of support from your parents and from your family. Was that surprising?

Al-Farra: I remember when I went to my dad, and told him that I was going to do hip-hop and he looked at me and said, “Good. Do it.” But when I used to walk down the streets wearing pants down, people would ask me if I was wearing my mom’s pants. So while I was getting support from family and friends, others looked at it in a different way.

Q: Are you getting any Israeli support?

Jrere: Israel now is right-wing so it’s always the minority that supports you. No one plays us on the radio, we don’t have television… we don’t have people who support art or artists. The album that you saw took us five years to complete.

Q: Have the CDs been selling well?

Tamer: It’s not just the first Palestinian hip-hop album; it’s the first Palestinian album in all ways. It’s been selling in America and Europe but we are having terrible problems getting it to the Arabic world and the Israeli market because to the Israelis we are Arabs, and to the rest of the Arab world we are Israelis. So we’re caught in the middle.

Q: How do you plan on spreading this story further and capitalizing on the film?

Salloum: The first step is to get this film out for the world to see it and get the rappers to tour with the film and let the world see another side and hear other voices. They’ve developed something incredible there. Kids used to grow up looking up to drug dealers with their money and fancy cars. Now they look up to (the artists). They walk up to them on the streets and rap and sing with them. Just to see the kids with this new form of music has brought a lot of hope to the kids in the streets.