Hip-hop and its spirituality circulates worldwide and is adopted in various ways nowadays, taking on different characteristics depending on the local and socio-political contexts, the international trends that determine its flow, but also the racial and gendered subjectivities that are active in it. This film attempts to highlight the contents of hip-hop spirituality in the Greek context, using hip-hop dance as a vehicle, but also its involvement with various other elements of spirituality and transreligiosity, new age practices and artistic creation. It delves into the social qualities of gender and ethnic identity resonating with hip-hop dance, but also important dimensions in human life such as well-being and healing through the cultivation of a hip-hop ethos. The 5th Element of hip-hop, that is ‘knowledge’ is the canvas for this exploration of hip-hop spirituality. B-girl Nalum and Fuerza Negra are the two dancers who activate this hip-hop spirituality in different and convergent ways.
The film was created in the framework of ReSpell – Religion, Spirituality and Wellbeing: a Comparative Approach of Transreligiosity and Crisis in Southern Europe (Cria, PI Eugenia Roussou).
George Danopoulos
George Danopoulos studied sound recording theory and film history. In 2018, he completed the short documentary Rita, a film that explores the character of a sex worker in a brothel in Athens. So far, Rita has participated in 25 festivals in Greece and abroad, winning awards at 7 of them, the most important of which are: the award for best documentary at Unfiltered Cinema in Minsk, Belarus, first prize at the 13th International Documentary Festival of Chalkida in 2019, and the Grand Jury Prize at the 4th IPAS International Independent Film Festival in Athens, where Giorgos Danopoulos has been appointed a member of the jury for 2021. In November 2022, he completed a feature-length observational documentary entitled A.T.H.E.N.S.. The film’s theme was the city of Athens, as seen through the stories of its residents, offering an experiential approach to observing moments of their daily activities. A.T.H.E.N.S. had its world premiere to great acclaim at Beldocs, the international documentary film festival in Belgrade, Serbia. In 2023, he created the short documentary Exit Within as part of a co-production between the Peloponnese International Documentary Festival and the ZINEBI International Documentary Festival in Bilbao, Spain. The film links art, imprisonment in adult and juvenile prisons, and life after imprisonment, and is part of the feature-length documentary series Claiming Freedom. Exit Within premiered in Greece at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival. He is currently in the process of producing the documentary Living Ruins a film in which abandoned places are interwoven with the sounds of seven locations from an imaginary past and brought back to life in the present. He is also in the pre-production stage of a feature-length documentary in Mexico City entitled The House of Beautiful Flowers.
Natalia Koutsougera
Natalia Koutsougera is a social anthropologist (Laboratory Teaching Staff, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University) who works at the intersection of the anthropology of youth cultures, the anthropology of entertainment, the anthropology of music and dance, popular culture and gender, visual anthropology and hip-hop studies. She uses interdisciplinary approaches as well as multimodal methodologies inspired by both anthropology, cultural and media studies. She is the author of many articles and chapters in international and domestic scientific journals and volumes regarding hip-hop, gender studies, anthropology and youth cultures, while for the last seventeen years she has been working as a critic and columnist for the contemporary dance and performance portal dancetheater.gr. She has directed and produced three ethnographic dance documentaries: “Born to Break” (2011), “The Girls Are Here” (2015) and “An Element of Hope” (2025) on the topics of hip-hop, urban dance styles, spiritualities in hip-hop, hip-hop femininities, street cultures and gender. In 2024 she published her monograph “Bred in the Western Suburbs: Dance, Music and Youth Cultures in Ellinadiko” which explores “laiko” (popular) and trap cultures in nightclubs of Western Attica from the 1990s to the present. Natalia has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre of Hellenic Studies in Greece (Harvard University) and is also the Scientific Officer of the Erasmus Program (2025-2028) UFemTP: A Mobilizing Training and Multimodal Platform (Panteion University).