The film The Silk Road of Pop (2013: 53 min.) ends with a young Uyghur rapper saying that he wants the world to know that Uyghurs exist. The man, a sculpted crop of hair jutting from his chin, says “Aside from China, who knows that Uyghurs exist? Zero percent.” As a view from a train window merges into film credits while the Uyghur singer Perhet Xaliq and his wife Pezilet sing an old song of Uyghur youth “sent-down” from the city, the pathos of his plea seem to resonate with the atmosphere of the land, the tight cement block apartments, the frozen sidewalks paved with Shandong tiles. Being contemporary Uyghurs is something that young people in Xinjiang seem to think about and perform all the time. You can hear it in the air. Why doesn’t the sound they make travel back to them? This mesmerizing new documentary film by the Canadian and Swiss filmmakers Sameer Farooq and Ursula Engel pulls the viewer in and out of the dense soundscape of Northwest China. Moving between the …