VIFF 2022 Previews #6: Know Your Place (an interview with Zia Mohajerjasbi)

By far, my favourite non-documentary that I have previewed for the VIFF this year is Know Your Place, the feature debut of Iranian-American filmmaker Zia Mohajerjasbi. It's a film of great richness, confidence, and visual beauty, playing the VIFF on October 4th and 5th with the director in attendance. I had picked the film as one to look at from the catalogue simply because the description reminded me of Police Beat, the Seattle-shot film that sees the city through the eyes of a conservative African immigrant bicycle cop (you can read the full text of my CineAction interview with screenwriter Charles Mudede here). My hopes rose further to discover that Mohajerjasbi himself admired Mudede and Devor's film, though I tried to keep my expectations grounded, lest I be disappointed: how could Know Your Place, about two friends, one of Eritrean background and one Ethiopian, on a trek through Seattle to deliver a care package to a family friend, possibly live up to one of my favourite films of all time? 

Time will tell if I will still be talking about Know Your Place eighteen years later, still excited to watch it (I have Police Beat on DVD and see it every few years), but having now seen it, it's certainly possible that I will be. Know Your Place is a highly visually compelling, moving, and profound film which will reward multiple viewings and stimulate many important conversations. I have plans to take in a second viewing of it on the big screen (because it deserves it, having some of the most gorgeous images of Seattle ever lensed, which may have helped it -  along with Klondike, also in the VIFF - win the top award at the Seattle Film Festival this past April). 

Director Zia Mohajerjasbi was very patient in both facilitating my seeing his film, which faced some tech challenges, and generous in answering my admittedly excessive onslaught of email interview questions. I'll let my questions and his answers speak for themselves.  Highly recommended (I am in italics, below, Zia not). 

Zia Mohajerjasbi 

Allan: The structure of the film is quite elegant - it's a very simple "journey" narrative, there and back again - that reminded me of a folktale or a dream. Would you describe this as a road movie? Would it be correct that the "story is not the story," but rather what happens to the characters along the way? 

Zia: What is essential, that I think you’re picking up on, is that the story and what happens isn’t always about the plot itself. I tried to allow space within the structure of the film for characters to live on screen as complete people, to have at least a few moments to exist fully once they’d been introduced. I didn’t want people to come on and off screen and exist in the vacuum of the mainline, living only in service of the two leads or the plot. In that way, I think the world in the film sort of breathes and feels alive, the way Robel and Fahmi’s errand might actually feel outside the confines of the frame.

L to R: Natnael Mebrahtu (Fahmi) and Joseph Smith (Robel)

Were there specific inspirations to this approach?

I’m a huge fan of Iranian cinema. I love the films of Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami. Where is the Friend’s House? had a significant impact on the general architecture of Know Your Place as a journey narrative.

Did you grow up in Seattle? Do you have much in common with Robel (do your parents speak Farsi at home, for example, as his parents speak - what, Tigrinya? I am not sure what language we are hearing in his home). Curious why you chose an ethnicity other than yours for your main character....? That seems interesting and ambitious of you, curious what motivated it, what your starting point was - in particular I wonder if it was important for aspects of the film that Robel and Fahmi be darker in skin tone, that this would allow for more overt confrontations with racism...? (I do take at least one character's response to them as being motivated and informed primarily by racism).

I did grow up in Seattle. My father is from Iran. My mother was born and raised in the Seattle area, her roots are Lithuanian/German. Farsi was actually my first language, and was spoken to us by both parents growing up. As I got older and started going to school, when my parents, extended family or elders in community would speak Farsi, I would respond in English. A classic dynamic with many first generation immigrant kids, regardless of a parent’s country of origin, so I definitely have this in common with Robel.

See this link for more context around my experience as a filmmaker in Seattle, and the formative friendships, relationships and community spaces that informed my writing a film centering these two lead characters:

https://crosscut.com/culture/2022/04/seattle-movie-about-loss-and-gentrification-debuts-siff

A note on language - it's really naturalistic, but the kids speak in a sort of African-American dialect that I found hard to follow at times - it never really interfered with my understanding of what was going on, but I'd say a good 20% of what they say was incomprehensible to me.(I even tried to see if the Closed Captions worked on the screener but they didn't). It'd be terrifying for me as a writer to try to capture their dialogue - I'd be constantly worried I'd gotten it wrong. How "written" are their lines, especially when Robel and Fahmi interact with each other? Did you encourage them to improvise, or workshop with them, or did you write their parts like this? 

The vast majority of the dialogue is scripted, but I’d estimate I revised about 15-20% of it through a pretty rigorous rehearsal process with Joseph (Robel) and Natnael (Fahmi), as well as the rest of the cast. I encourage improvisation, and I like to workshop things so the actors have a chance to make all the words really their own. I often end up improvising the most, writing new lines, adding a little flourish here and there. Ultimately, many of the changes I made in rehearsals were about giving the rhythm and tone of the film precisely that naturalism, without altering the meaning of a scene or significant exchange between characters.

More an observation than a question, but I hope you can speak to it... I was surprised at how easy I found it to identify with Robel's miseries, thinking back to my own youth - including having more conservative Christian parents, not knowing where I was "supposed to be" (I still don't, really) and even being randomly hassled as a teenager by cops on the streets of Maple Ridge, made to account for my comings and goings - an experience I did not recall having, in fact, and hadn't thought about for years, until seeing your film). I ended up really quite admiring how easy you made it for the audience to enter Robel's experience - I began by second-guessing myself ("am I erasing the specificities of this young man's experience by thinking I can identify with him? Do I have the right as a white person to presume that I know what he's feeling here?") and ended by feeling like this was something you were actually striving for, that you want your audience to really feel quite close to Robel, to be aware of similarities, not differences...

I certainly was hoping for the audience to feel close with Robel. To really see him. I love hearing when folks connect with him. Sometimes I worried about that because for the first 30 minutes of the film he is a relatively opaque character - even passive in certain scenes. I actually kind of relate to Robel because of that. I relate when “supposed to be” still comes up for me all the time. I relate to his sort of illusory want for a greater sense of community, a sense of place. All of that.

However, this idea of focusing on the similarities vs differences as a kind of dichotomy doesn’t exactly encompass the intention for me. I think it’s both; all of it. What I might find as different, being a light skinned Iranian-American man, another viewer may find entirely relatable depending on their experience, their vantage point, their gaze. The question for me then as a filmmaker, is how can I hold all that is narratively relevant in the frame so the life of the character is complete? That completeness is what allows for multiple interpretations. For nuance. And even for a life beyond anything I might have ideated initially.

Please tell me about the cabbie. Who was the actor, where did you find him, is he a professional...? The cabbie's speech about "diversity" is really interesting and seems key to the film - his observation that we are "drowning in a sea of names." Could you elaborate on that? It seemed like it was thematically important, that he was giving voice to key elements in your film.

The actor that plays the cabbie is Aaron Sahle. He is cousins with Rahwa Habte who started Hidmo (referencing the Crosscut article above). We’ve been friends for years, and he was the only person I auditioned for the part. One of my closest friends, Futsum Tsegai, who worked on the film, and who has been a creative collaborator for years made the recommendation after reading the script. As soon as he suggested it, we both started laughing, and knew it would work before Aaron even read it.

“Drowning in a sea of names” stems from feelings of heaviness about a world whose basic architecture functions primarily on conflict and separation. Xenophobia incanting itself in infinity. We talk about “diversity” because Xenophobia is what is actually happening. We talk about “inclusion” because racism and white supremacy is what is actually happening. So we need to talk about and dismantle those underlying conditions to plainly have the diversity and inclusion.

“See how nice I am,” is a personal favorite as well haha.

It was interesting how fair ("generous?") you were to the cop. You could have had a cop stop the kids WITHOUT having had them break into a building through a window, but in fact, you provided the cop with perfectly reasonable motivation to hassle them, more than cops sometimes have. And then Fahmi DOES get standoffish, and makes things worse for himself. Why was that important to you, to be fair to the cop? With so many police shootings of black kids in the States, I wonder if that scene has drawn any controversy or criticism ("letting the cop off too lightly?"). Or did you figure it would be stressful enough for audiences to make it through the scene WITHOUT the cop being a dick?

Personally, I think that cop is a dick lol.

Initially, the cop showing up is less about the cop - but rather the question of who called him in the first place. Which pale-faced displacer moved into this gentrifying neighborhood and didn’t talk to their neighbors a single time, decided something like two kids who have lived there their whole lives was “suspicious” then called an institution that they doubtlessly know is disproportionately violent toward Black people? Like dude...what is wrong with you? Go outside and say hi to someone. The cop letting them go was intentional in that it didn’t end in a violent headline, yet violence was done. Emotional violence. To a degree, physical violence. Mental violence, etc.

I had not been aware that there were areas of Seattle with so many boarded up homes. Am I correct in my reading that Robel comes from a poor neighbourhood, and has to voyage through fairly wealthy ones to arrive at his destination? (Is there indication in the film that his own neighbourhood will be also subject to the forces of gentrification?). Is this a concern for you, personally? (It is for me - there have been dozens of demovictions here in Burnaby in recent years).

Director’s statement speaks to this a bit, copy and pasting that below:

The Pacific Northwest raised me. Seattle is home. This film is both a love letter and a lament.

It is personal as an attempt to capture the beauty of the place that raised me and those I keep company with, in this moment of rapid transition; in which the disappearance of the familiar continues to gain momentum with increasing scope and intensity. The dissolution of community, economic displacement, and redevelopment of legacy neighborhoods has made part of the city to which I’d been intimately connected almost unrecognizable. This film is about capturing some sense of what Seattle is, what it has been, what it is becoming. It is a film about home.

Through an intimate narrative lens and characterization, Know Your Place depicts impermanence as a relative experience. The film centers this experience through the eyes of Robel, an Eritrean-American boy of 15 years, at a time of transition in his own life, within the greater transitional context of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

The film’s key performers are almost all first-time actors or second-time collaborators with me. I am unwaveringly committed to a methodology that embraces storytelling as a universal human trait. As tools to filmmakers become more available, the localization of cinema is vital - adding nuance, specificity, potency and authenticity to stories represented in film. No story is “too small”.

In essence, Know Your Place is an exercise in this process - reflecting the possibilities of storytelling in cinema that is grounded in community, friendship and ongoing cultural exchange. This film is as independent and homegrown as it gets: a diverse cross section of our city’s inhabitants, collaborating to bring a story of ‘home’ to life in a way that honors the beauty of our shared space, and the nuance of the individual experiences contained within it.

The photography by Nicholas Wiesnet was gorgeous - do you have history with him? Was there other work he'd done that made you want to use him? It's a very beautiful portrait of Seattle (having interacted about Mudede and Devor, I half-expected their usual DOP, Sean Kirby, to appear in the credits).

Niko shot my short film "Hagereseb" back in 2013 - which also happened to be the first film Joseph and Natty were cast in when they were 10. How we all worked together telling that story really developed a creative trust between Niko and I. I really admire his sensitivity to the storytelling, and his flexibility and enjoyment of working with the relative inexperience of first-time actors. I’m quite obsessive about the image as well, and thankfully we both gravitate to a similar sort of painterly aesthetic, which we really worked to bring to Know Your Place. Rendering the mundanities of daily life beautifully - that’s where I feel we both come to life in our collaboration together.

Can you comment on the film's budget? I was particularly struck by how expensive the film looked - there are even what seem to be helicopter shots of the city (maybe I'm wrong, but I'm always impressed when a film I expect to have a low budget still includes such things). Did you scrimp on other aspects of the film to make something that looked expensive, or did you actually secure a decent budget for yourself? Were you shooting on film or video? (Any tricks for other filmmakers making their first feature? How did you make the film look so good?).

I’ll say this, the budget is quite likely less than you think it to be. This is a true independent film. I always work to stretch the resources of a production as much as possible. A beautiful image is important to me. It is part of the story of a film. It is part of cinema. And often the quality of the image can be the first tell to “they had no money” or “they had money.” One of the joys I have as a filmmaker is making this as confusing as possible. I’ve also been blessed with key creative collaborators who are similarly minded and aim to do the same. Folks like Marty Martin, our lead editor, also shot our aerial photography with a drone. Our producer/unit production manager, Ty Walker, also drove the picture cars home at night. Of course, Niko, our cinematographer, along with his keys in Camera and G&E. Really, the whole cast and crew were game for it. Collectively, we pushed this creatively as far as we could with the resources available.

We shot digitally on the Arri Alexa XT with 1970s Panavision Ultra Speeds Lenses.

The cast was also great, but no one seems to have other credits to their name on IMDB (unless they worked on your previous short film - be curious, incidentally, if that film has any bearing on this one). Are they all non-professionals, people you found from some other context? Have any of them acting backgrounds? How did you get such natural performances from them (the woman they deliver the suitcase to in the end of the film - I am not sure what the actresses name was - is nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying in how aggressively she insists that Robel eat something; I thought it was really quite a triumph for a non-actor to inhabit her nagging to such an extent that I got irritated by it!).

All the actors in the film are first-time, non-professional actors, except for four people who were in my previous short, Hagereseb. For them, Know Your Place is their second time acting.

I wrote about five parts in the film with specific people in mind, including our two leads. The rest of the film was cast between me and one of our associate producers, Mieraf Gebresellasie. We spent the summer before principal photography, contacting people in the community and setting up auditions. Mieraf and I would reach out to friends, friends of friends, parents of friends of friends, etc. It really became a community driven effort, and I don’t think we auditioned more than 5 or 6 people for a single part.

Performance is all rhythm. Often in my approach, I will tighten gaps in dialogue between characters, have folks step on each other’s lines, add small asides, invite a bit of improv, tune the blocking, and repeat a scene endlessly until it becomes second nature. I try to cultivate a space in which people feel at ease to share of themselves; this includes the “director.” We’re doing this together. I keep the process simple and collaborative. The alchemy of repetition and an open exchange of ideas often leads to pretty decent results.

This is all fitting very well with my experience of the film - it makes sense. But returning briefly to the nagging, my wife was curious if that was a comment on poverty - if the kid's refusal to eat stemmed from a very real food shorage among the families? (The shelves are pretty bear at Robel's family's house - if those are his circumstances, he might actually be refusing the food out of a desire not to put a burden on them).

No, just being polite, and also wanting to get out of there. Common refusal of overbearing hospitality.

Joseph Smith as Robel

Why does Robel fall asleep so often (on the bus, etc)....? Where did that plot element come from...? It makes him an easier target... BTW, Is Fahmi solely motivated by a desire for safekeeping when he pockets the money - it seemed that way?).

This one is funny, because I only noticed this once we edited the assembly cut of the film. I was like oh no, is my go-to plot device, “he falls asleep?”

Fahmi is solely motivated by a desire for safekeeping. That moment is shown ambiguously at first to raise a question about him, because if he had duplicitous intentions, that’s sort of a lame cliche. His only ever truly being a friend subverts that. The real conflict between them is never actually between them. It’s within Robel.

The title of the film had me expecting something more overtly about racism, but ended up seeming much richer than that. When in the process of making the film did you arrive at that title?

I wrote the first draft, slapped that title on there, and then couldn’t think of anything better later. I think the film kind of named itself. After writing the script, I titled it almost immediately when everything was fresh, and Know Your Place was the first thing that came up. It can mean many things, so I stuck with it.

Feel free to jettison this question, but I'm wondering if you had your own experiences of racism in Seattle? (It seems a very diverse city, though more like Toronto than Vancouver, in terms of the ethnic mixture one sees - but I presume you lived through the aftermath of 9/11 in the USA,...? That must have had fraught moments (I was actually living in Japan in 2001-2002, so I don't really know what it was like over here).

Indubitably. Post 9/11 we had the scary-breathing-into-phone thing happen a few times on the house line. The cops showed up once at our doorstep because the postman said that the tree pollen on the mailbox was Anthrax that my Middle Eastern father put there. At 12 y/o I was surrounded by no less than four police officers outside the local library, accused of defecating in the book return, called a terrorist and threatened with jail time - while just waiting with a friend for a ride home after the library had closed. List goes on. You know, that kind of stuff.

Nope, I don't, actually, at least not from my own life experiences! But.... is there anything else I've missed? (Will you be here for all screenings of that film? Any history with Vancouver to speak of...?).

I’ll be in attendance at both screenings of the film - October 4th and 5th. Definitely have history with Vancouver. I have extended family in a few places around B.C. I would actually go to Maple Ridge quite a bit growing up to see my cousins.

Know Your Place screens October 4th and 5th, with Zia Mohajerjasbi in attendance.