Planet of the Arabs

This short film from the Sundance festival seems to be doing a lot of viral business across the web right now, and no harm there.

'Planet of the Arabs' is a short movie by Arab-American director and artist Jacqueline Salloum that emulates a Hollywood blockbuster trailer. Its genius is that every single piece of footage in the cleverly edited montage has been taken from a recent and genuine Hollywood movie.

When I went to Egypt for the first time, I was stunned at how widely variant my perception of the Arab world was. But it shouldn't have surprised me how deeply ingrained the prejudices of Hollywood manage to infiltrate the psyche of everyone in the 'West.'

This short film shows why. Jacqui was apparently inspired to do the piece after discovering in Dr Jack Shaheen's book, 'Reel Bad Arabs' that out of 1000 mainstream movie depictions of Arabs in Hollywood in the past 100+ years, only 12 were positive and an astonishing 900 were...

Well, have a look and see for yourself what they were.