Habibi Jammin’takes us beyond the headlines and into the lives of four young people from the Arabic community in the troubled Western Sydney suburb of Bankstown. Nomise, Julie, Susan and Matuse are the most talented and articulate participants in the Jammin” in the Middle E drama project - which promises to produce a television drama based on stories from their lives. We follow them through the production stages of this unique drama process and look at how they respond when given the opportunity to tell their own stories. To be young and Arabic in Bankstown is to have lived through the last four years of negative racial stereotyping: Children Overboard, Tampa, September 11, and “Lebanese gang rapes”. Habibi Jammin’is a first-hand account of being young and Arabic from a much neglected perspective; we hear from the irrepressible, hilarious and ambitious young Arabic men and women themselves. The politics of representation rate highly in this project. The content revolves around how the young people feel they are perceived by the wider Australian public and what effect this has on the day-to-day activities in their lives - whether it be battling in front of a hostile audience at a rap battle or feeling protective toward their younger brothers and sisters in the face of adverse media hype. The device of structuring the documentary around a film production provides lots of trigger points for personal experiences of what it means to be an Australian “who happens to pray five times a day”. The process of creating characters and nursing those characters through a dramatic script allows the doco to compare and contrast the dramatic characters with the reality of the young people’s lives. Habibi Jammin’ is filmed over a two year period. During that time we chart the unfolding events in our characters’ lives, losing jobs, finding work, starting college, successes, failures and even marriage! The young people use wit and humour to invite the audience into their world as opposed to cajoling them with heavy-handed dogma. It’s a timely and charming expose of a much talked about but little understood sector of the Australian community.