33. Sabaah Folayan: Everything Is Practice

Sabaah Folayan is an activist and storyteller who illuminates the humanity, resilience and beauty in the struggle of communities as they mobilize and fight for justice. She merged her dedication to human rights and a newfound passion for film with Whose Streets?, a feature documentary chronicling the experience of Ferguson community members after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. Sabaah and her co-director Damon Davis are premiering Whose Streets? at Sundance 2017, but this episode’s conversation took place in October of 2015, when Sabaah was still in the depths of production and stepped away to pitch the film at Camden International Film Festival’s Points North Forum in Maine. We talk with Sabaah about moving to Ferguson, working to understand the complexities of the situation amongst a sea of sensational headlines, the unique education she had between living off the land in Hawaii and living in divergent Los Angeles neighborhoods, and the forever valuable lesson she learned as a basketball player, “Everything you do is practice for the next time you do it.” The music in this episode is off Velvet and Bone, a new album by a past MusicMaker, Stag Hare.