I first came to know the young Iranian independent film maker Vahid Vakilifar at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival in 2009 where his feature film debut, the neorealist Gesher won the Best Film award and he received his prize from president of the jury who was none other than the late Iranian master, Abbas Kiarostami. Then in the 2012 Dubai International Film Festival where he presented his film Taboor, I acted as his English-Persian interpreter, and we became good friends. Taboor was different to Gesher in every way but was very warmly received in Dubai. Vakilifar’s films post Gesher can perhaps be described as surrealist sci-fi post-modern, with philosophical undertones. One can see influences of directors such as Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Lynch and alike. In other words, as far away from Iranian mainstream cinema as can be imagined. As a result, his films have received scant public screening in his homeland and he has mainly relied on foreign film festivals for screening of his movies, where his films have collected many awards.
Vakilifar has steadfastly and courageously stuck to his way of making films and his latest K9was recently premiered on a foreign TV channel. We sat down in a coffee shop in Tehran to talk about his films and his struggles in making them.
Ali Moosavi, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): How did you get into filmmaking?
Vahid Vakilifar (VV): I studied filmmaking at university and obtained a bachelor’s degree. But my passion for film making started in my early teenage years. I had a cousin who was a leftist intellectual and loved Russian cinema and used to take me to film clubs. At that time, I couldn’t comprehend the film of Tarkovsky and other Russian filmmakers. So I grew up with that outlook into cinema. At high school I joined a theatre group and worked in the theatre till I entered university.
(UM): Gesher which was you first professional feature film, was a neo-realist movie but the films you made after that were completely different and not easily assigned to any particular genre. Why this radical change?
(VV): It wasn’t planned; it just happened. Cinema for me has never been an industry or a business and I’ve always treated it as an art form. I’ve never looked at outside for inspirations for movies, everything comes from inside my head, which is constantly full of ideas. So this change of style probably has something to do with changes happening inside me, though I’ve always had a fascination for both realist films like Gesher and more abstract films like Taboorand Jonas.
(UM): I think when producers first read your K9 script, they think it will be a big budget picture; but you’ve used a lot of creativity to make it for peanuts, while making it look like a big production movie.
(VV): Yes, when I had written the script and passed it to my crew, they all thought it would require a big budget. They were asking me how I’m going to make the film. Anyway, I really didn’t do anything out of the ordinary to make the film. I had almost zero budget and I think the design of the film and the work that my cinematographer (Mohammad RezaJahanpanah) did with his radical lighting added a new dimension to our film. After a few days I assembled a few shots together in my laptop and invited the crew to watch it. Up to that time they were skeptical whether we pull it off but after seeing the assembled shots came on board and the filming process became much smoother.
(UM): Why did you decide to premier K9 on a foreign TV channel?
(VV): We shot the film in 2018 and finished post-production in 2019. We looked for a distributor and also sent the film to a few film festivals. Then we hit the Corona pandemic and could not go through with our plans for screening the movie in cultural centers. Film festivals had either been cancelled or limited to online screenings. This literary killed our movie. Then I decided that instead of keeping the film at home and showing it to my friends, I’ll give it to one of the TV stations so that a large number of people could watch it.
(UM): Do you storyboard your films?
(VV): I wish I knew how to do that properly. Unfortunately my drawing ability has not improved since I was 5 years old! I do a very crude version of storyboarding. What I do every time – and this stems from my academic study of filmmaking – is to write the description of every scene in the film, including camera and actors placement and movement and even the allocated time for the scene. It’s a very time consuming exercise but I’m used to doing it. It saves me a lot of time during shooting.
(UM): I think both sound design and sound effects play a key role in your films.
(VV): Very much so. I normally write my scripts very quickly and my shoots are also relatively short; K9 is my longest shoot and it took 26 days. But the longest time in my productions is dedicated to sound design and sound effects. I wanted an artificial world. This artificiality could not only be created through images, it also needed the appropriate sounds. I was lucky enough to work with a first-rate sound man (Hassan Mahdavi) on this movie. With sound design he created an amazing world in my movie. I think one of the things that differentiates the different environments is the sound. So sound is a crucial element in creating the different worlds within my films. The sound work on K-9 took almost five months with a nine-man team. None of the sound in the film was recorded live; even the dialogues were dubbed later.
(UM): Your films don’t have much dialogue anyway. In K9 there is quite a bit of narration and voiceover, but you mostly rely on the images.
(VV): Yes, and the sound aids the images to create the environment that I’m after.
(UM): How do you find the budgets for your films?
(VV): My films are necessarily low budget. I mostly rely on family and friends for funding. For Gesher we had a fund from Rotterdam Film Festival. For K9 I had found a distributor in New York but he couldn’t sign a contract with me because of the economic sanctions imposed on Iran by USA.
(UM): What is the state on Independent Cinema in Iran now?
(VV): I think Independent Cinema here is on its last legs. A few filmmakers who can get funding from abroad can survive but others are finding it very difficult to work. Those in charge of overseeing film production in Iran have done a couple of things which have helped to almost kill off the Independent Cinema here. One was to increase the charge rates for various film crew making them out of reach of most independent filmmakers. The other thing they did was to force distributors to only distribute films which have permits for production and screening both in Iran and film festivals abroad. In order to soften the blow, they will give distributors a subsidy when their films are shown in film festivals. In this way they have put a huge stumbling block in front of the independent cinema. Whoever came up with these measures has totally succeeded in controlling the internal independent cinema. So the Iranian films being shown at foreign film festivals are those approved by the government, except those films sent to festivals surreptitiously by the likes of Jafar Panahi, Mohammad Rasoulof, etc. who are established names outside Iran.