My group was with Elvis and Ama. First, we talked about what stood out to us in the documentary, then we used the questions given as guiding discussion questions about the film. While talking about the documentary, we found that we had a lot of the same conclusions about it. One critique that we had about the film was how fast paced it was. We all felt as though it jumped topics a lot and took a more lighthearted view. I feel like it would have been interesting to see a play by play of their interactions throughout their time together, but it would have made the documentary considerably longer. Besides learning specific things about Morocco and Moroccan culture, the film did not impact my personal views. While watching the film, I found that a lot of what happened followed the progression of intercultural communication that we discussed in the beginning of the semester. They started off thinking that the other was very different from themselves. Later that day, they were all hanging out and having fun together and it didn’t seem as though they were different from each other at all. However the next morning, they were arguing about politics and representation and the disparities between the groups were apparent again. While watching, it was admirable to see how close they got to one another, but the whole time, and how there really wasn’t a social difference between the two groups. However, there was the looming knowledge that once they left, the social differences between them that had been constructed before they were born would kick in. One thing that we all passionately agreed on is that the general view of Muslims in the U.S. was not fair. We didn’t go into this question too much, but two things that were cited were the Israel Palestine conflict and post 911 hate incidents against Muslims in the United States. I wouldn’t say that after taking the film I was inspired to take any action. I felt like the documentary was more observational and less of a call to action. Realistically, I do not know what action could be taken. A lot of our intercultural problems are less on the individual level, but more on the government and policy and media level.
