Wifi Rider | Documentary about a Viral Palestinian Fashion Designer

Life is lonely for young Palestinian, Shukri. He spends his days on the internet, immersed in a world where Western popstars preach self-love, to forget the discrimination he faces in everyday life. But dreaming of a life abroad does not bode well for a teenager stuck in East Jerusalem. A selection of Short of the Week, the web's leading curators of quality short films. SUBMIT A FILM: https://www.shortoftheweek.com/submit/ FULL REVIEW: https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2021/07/29/wifi-rider/ Subscribe to S/W on YouTube! Website: http://www.shortoftheweek.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ShortoftheWeek Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shortoftheweek Twitter: https://twitter.com/shortoftheweek Wifi Rider Directed by Roxy Rezvany https://roxyrezvany.co.uk/ "Wifi Rider is a really difficult film to quantify in a pithy way. I hesitate to use the word “complex” to describe this meditative portrait of Palestinian youth Shukri (aka the “Wifirider”) as I realize that phrasing is loaded in a way that I don’t intend it to be. When it comes to journalism and stories about Palestine or Palestinian culture, there tends to be a lot of hand-wringing in the larger global ecosystem—an unspoken fear and failure to acknowledge Palestinian identity. I don’t want to be dismissive of the current humanitarian crisis in the region and there is far too much nuance to the issues at hand than I can adequately address in a short film review, but when I say “complex,” I simply mean that Roxy Rezvany’s film is about a plethora of topics that can’t be neatly filed into the “standard portrait doc” formula. Wifi Rider is a lot of things: a coming of age tale of a young man who never quite fit in, the uncanny feeling of having a homeland with no country, and, above all, a driving altruistic desire to make a positive difference in the world via art and building community. It’s a pastiche of thematic material, each, somehow, not given short shrift across its 12-minute run-time. But, perhap