[7] Kelani has spoken publicly about a turning point when, as a teenager, she attended a family wedding in the village of Nein outside Nazareth and became interested in Palestinian[8] and Arabic music.
[11] For the programme, Kelani performed her unique blending of George Gershwin's "The Half of It, Dearie' Blues" with traditional Palestinian singing.
[12] Kelani's solo album Sprinting Gazelle—Palestinian Songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora, released in 2006, represented the culmination of many years of research and preparation.
Organised by the British Council, Reem brought together for the tour a bespoke line-up comprising three of her UK musicians and three from Syria: Amir Qara Jouli (violin), Basel Rajoub (saxophones), and Simon Mreach (percussion).
[16] It featured poetry and prose written by Reem and members of the orchestra, as well as verses by Robert Burns (A Slave's Lament) and Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Rootless).
[18] In October 2008, Kelani collaborated with the Portuguese Fado singer, Liana,[19] on a special commission for the Musicport Festival, Whitby, entitled "From Palestine to Portugal".
She first performed in Turkey in June 2005 at the Cemal Resit Rey Concert Hall, as part of Istanbul municipality's conference on "Women from the Middle East."
This was followed, in November 2008, by her concert at the Babylon Club in Istanbul, on the occasion of the British Council's visiting "Lure of the East" exhibition of Orientalist painting at the Pera Museum.
[22] He saw a natural partnership between Kelani, with her representation of Palestinian culture, and Kardes Turkuler, which is one of the musical arms of the collective organization BGST.
[25] Kelani’s association with Kardes Turkuler continued in April 2014 with a joint concert at TIM Maslak in Istanbul[26] which attracted considerable interest in the Turkish media.
The documentaries comprised: In 2004, Kelani played Scheherazade in BBC Radio Four's programme entitled "A Thousand and One"(a series about the influence of The Arabian Nights on Western culture).
Writing in the Times Literary Supplement on 4 June 2004, Jane Jakeman noted: Of course, the most compelling voice throughout the series was that of Scheherazade herself, ethereally present in spellbinding extracts beautifully read by Reem Kelani.
Also in 2004, Kelani appeared as a guest of Sandi Toksvig on BBC Radio Four's Excess Baggage, alongside Sir James Galway and singer-songwriter Glenn Tilbrook.
[citation needed] For BBC 2's Everyman series in 1992, Kelani wrote original music for See No Evil on the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut in 1982.
[62] Produced by the French filmmaker Axel Salvatori-Sinz, it follows a group of young men and women in the Palestinian refugee settlement of Yarmouk Camp outside Damascus.
For the title track, Iyad Hayatleh, the Glasgow-based Palestinian poet and son of Yarmouk, wrote the verse, which Kelani then set to music.