so i am an artist and filmmaker and i\u2019m presently working on a documentary about mainstream muslims, which is most muslims out there. the only problem is that they\u2019re completely invisible. maybe i feel the frustration of being disappeared or maybe it\u2019s just that i\u2019m tired of being represented by people i cannot relate to, including the westernized muslim \u201cinsider\u201d who\u2019s made a cottage industry out of denouncing islam.<\/p>\n
an essential part of getting to know muslims on film is getting to know non-muslims first. the film has to acquire the form of a dialogue. i wanted to survey a cross section of non-muslim americans and ask them what they thought about islam and muslims in general. i wanted them to frame the questions i was going to pose to muslim interviewees. to this end i went to starry nites cafe today along with thom marini, my cinematographer. customer traffic was disappointingly slow but we got a few people to do a vox pop. vox populi is latin for “voice of the people”. it’s a technique used in documentary filmmaking to gauge popular opinion by asking a large number of random people the same question and aggregating their responses. thom and i filmed for about 3 hours and got some interesting questions. many women wanted to know about female subjugation in islam. one woman made a brief but cogent statement that was so wonderfully phrased i’m tempted to use it as a closing. the sun was out and we had plenty of light inside the cafe, which is visually stunning anyway. it was all good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
so i am an artist and filmmaker and i\u2019m presently working on a documentary about mainstream muslims, which is most muslims out there. the only problem is that they\u2019re completely invisible. maybe i feel the frustration of being disappeared or maybe it\u2019s just that i\u2019m tired of being represented by people i cannot relate to, … Continue reading my first post ever<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22385,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/22385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}