2016 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

To address the generational and cultural gap, we created a piece of entertainment through the important usage of Arabic language and popular western hip-hop musical genre. The idea was to highlight the culture clash within an Arab-American family with the use of distinct cultural iconography and styles. The film begins with a cliché Arab-American dad who enters his teenager’s room; it’s a mess, with no signs of Arabic roots. The dad asks his son to put his video-game down and join the family in the TV-room to spend quality time together. Unconvinced, the son answers in an ill-mannered way with a harsh American accent. Deceived, his dad leaves the room and the teenager falls into a dream-sequence of Arabic rap-battle with his father. The rest is a surreal music video, with all scenes and interiors reworked in the kids’ subconscious. Throughout the film, pronunciation of traditional Arabic foods are used as a test of how in culturally In-touch he is. It ends with the teenager waking up in the same position as he fell asleep, as though he just experienced a revelation. He joins his parents in the TV-room and speaks to them in his mother-tongue, leaving them in awe.