Bram Van Splunteren, Big Fun In The Big Town, NL, 1986, 41′

Big Fun in the Big Town is a music documentary from 1986 commissioned by the Dutch television VPRO. The documentary was shot on location in New York with Marcel Vanthilt as a reporter on site. Vanthilt and Van Splunteren managed to interview various important pioneers of the hip-hop movement, including Run-D.M.C., LL Cool J, Doug E. Fresh, Grandmaster Flash, Roxanne Shante, Biz Markie, MC Shan, Russell Simmons, Mr. Magic, Schoolly D, and The Last Poets. Grandmaster Flash showed his skills as a scratcher and DJ, Doug E. Fresh beatboxed on a busy street corner in Harlem, New York, and LL Cool J was barely 18 years old and still lived with his grandmother at the time of filming. The reporting team arrived literally at a turning point. Run-D.M.C. had just released the single Walk This Way, their duet with the rock group Aerosmith, which definitively accepted hip-hop into the white mainstream. As a result, Big Fun in the Big Town also offers a unique document of the time. The film was one of the first documentaries to document hip-hop and had a huge impact on the popularity of the music style in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, RISE, CA, 2018, 21′

RISE explores how rhythm, spoken word, and dance are used by performers to creatively express their personal relationships to identity and self-representation. The cast, mainly consisting of first and second-generation immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, are members of the group R.I.S.E (Reaching Intelligent Souls Everywhere) – a youth-led movement that organizes weekly poetry slams in suburban community centers to provide artistic, personal, social, and spiritual opportunities for young people in the Greater Toronto Area.

Filmed on Line 1 of the Toronto Transit Commission’s subway system, Wagner & de Burca see the subway tunnels as a literal cipher used by the performers to connect with each other and the rest of the world.