Fashioning Markets: Muslimah Designers and Economic EmpowermentFashioning Faith. Video. Produced and directed by Yasmin Moll through New York University’s Program in Culture and Media. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources, 2009.

Abstract

While few of us like overly didactic films, this one errs by revealing too little, too late, and then too quickly. It is not until the very end of the film that we learn these details. The film feels like raw data with most of the interpretation and all of the analysis, especially for a student audience, left to the viewer. What messages do the filmmakers wish us to take away? Is the film primarily a condemnation of pervasive social and economic inequality and neglect? Willets Point clearly has been neglected for years, lacking basic infrastructure and services. But why? Is it a condemnation of the Willets Point redevelopment plan in particular or all similar urban renewal projects? Not many people in the film seem to have much to say about the city’s plan; perhaps they lack the time and energy to think about it. Is Foreign Parts a piece of salvage ethnography meant to visually document a highly photogenic cultural scene before it disappears? It is a story of survival? Certainly the people profiled are scrappy survivors whose humanity comes across despite the bleakness of their personal plights and the environment they occupy. Foreign Parts is beautifully filmed and has won several awards, including the Opera Prima (for best first feature) and the Jury Prize in the “Filmmakers of the Present” competition at Locarno. It was also an official selection for the New York Film Festival. The filmmakers are skilled, and they have chosen a photogenic place and people to film. (Willets Point was also the setting for the 2007 fictional film Chop Shop by Ramin Bahrani.) Unfortunately, we did not find much anthropology in Foreign Parts, and with one exception we do not think it would be successful in the classroom, especially with undergraduates, and certainly never in its entirety. The pace is exceedingly slow, and it is only at the very end of its 80 minutes that the filmmakers provide a small amount of crucial contextual information. We doubt that most anthropology undergraduates would get that much out of it without a lot of guidance, supplemental reading, and patience. It might, however, be successfully used in an anthropological film course as an example of an almost purely observational film that could push students to think about the nature of “ethnographic” film. Paravel and Sniadecki’s approach is to let the data—the visuals, the sounds, the comments of a few—speak for themselves, without commentary or narrative structure. In conclusion, we found the film frustrating and at times tedious yet oddly captivating, largely due to its visual strength.