"Dima Punk" – A Conversation about Music Documentary, Subcultures and Street Language in Morocco

Abstract

In 2020, due to the COVID 19 pandemic, Germany’s oldest music film festival, the Hamburg-based UNERHÖRT! had to organize its fourteenth edition via online streamings. If there was any positive aspect about the pandemic, it consisted in granting more time to discussing the films through virtual Q&As. This article is an edited transcript of an interview in which the filmmaker, renowned sociolinguist and expert of North African Arab dialects Dominique Caubet, talked to UNERHÖRT! programme coordinator Stefan Pethke about her film Dima Punk (2019), featuring Stof, a young punk from Casablanca, Morocco. The in-depth discussion between Caubet and Pethke allowed them to address multifacted topics, such as punk in Casablanca, vernacular language in Morocco, and Western subcultures in the Global South.