Multi-day celebration of film, music

"We Rock Long Distance," a program featuring movies and music, continues tonight with the screening of the film We Rock Long Distance, a documentary by Justin Schell.

The movie weaves together the sounds and stories of three diasporic hip hop artists in Minnesota—Hmong rapper Tou SaiKo Lee, Puerto Rican rapper Maria IsaBell Perez (Maria Isa), and Ghanaian rapper M.anifest—as they journey home to Ghana, Puerto Rico, and Thailand to create unique connections across generation and geography.

The free screening begins at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 23, in Davis Auditorium, followed by a panel discussion with the Schell, Lee, and Isa. 

On Thursday, Sept. 24, this series of events will culminate in a diasporic hip hop concert featuring  Maria Isa, Tou SaiKo Lee, and Senegalese rapper Reskape (in his second Skidmore performance), with a DJ set by student musician Noah Prebish. The concert gets underway at 8 p.m. in Falstaffs.

The three-day event started Tuesday with a "Documenting Music" workshop by Schell, who also was a guest in Nicky Tavares' Documentary Film Studies class.

Elizabeth Macy, visiting assistant professor of music, began organizing the program last spring by connecting it to several academic programs and departments. She said the mini-residency is “tied closely to my Global Pop course, where students will be addressing hip hop as a global popular music trend closely linked with the African-American diaspora, and my Music of Southeast Asia course, where we are examining the role of the Hmong diaspora through Schell's film Travel in Spirals (2011) and Lee's journey to America.”

In addition, Asian Studies Professor Ben Bogin's Introduction to Asian Studies course was scheduled to meet with Schell and Lee, and Schell, Lee, and Perez also were scheduled to meet with the Music department’s senior seminar. 

Macy explained that Schell is a longtime friend and colleague, and she was looking for a way to make his work available to the Skidmore community.

To learn more about We Rock Long Distance, please visit the web site or view the trailer.

"We Rock Long Distance" is co-sponsored by Skidmore’s Department of Music and the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative, an initiative of Project VIS, the Mellon-sponsored program to advance strategic, pedagogical, and liberal learning goals in the area of visual literacy and communication. Other sponsors include the Speakers Bureau, Department of World Languages and Literatures, Asian studies program, international affairs program, Lively Lucy's, Hip Hop Alliance, and Raices.