5 Questions with Naz Riahi ("Sincerely, Erik" & "Andros in the City")
Photo by Oliver Feigel
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I'm a writer with an MFA in creative writing. For most of my adult life, I've had careers in advertising while simultaneously writing and publishing essays, journalism and fiction. But, I've always wanted to be a filmmaker. It really took this pandemic, at the start of which I lost clients, to say what have I got to lose? I might as well try the thing I've always wanted to do. So, I got a few friends together and wrote and directed my first film, Sincerely, Erik within a few weeks of deciding that I'd make a short. I thought it was an opportunity to see if I had the talent. I never expected that film to blow up in the way it did, with a Vimeo Staff Pick and then going on to win a Vimeo Best of the Year Award and being featured in places like The New York Times and Fast Company. Pretty quickly after I shot that film, and based on feedback from its audience, many of whom were strangers to me, I decided to make another short in the series. With Andros in the City, I wanted to push myself as a filmmaker, to make something that was more challenging for the audience and see if I could pull it off, so the second film is a lot of single takes, it mostly isn't scored and the color is intentionally hazy and extremely lo-fi.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
When I decided to make Sincerely, Erik, I'd been having a lot of conversations about isolation with my friend Erik DuRon, who ended up playing the character (a composite version of himself and me). It was the height of New York City's lockdown and as single people, we were both feeling very alone. I realized there were a lot of people feeling that way and in portraying that isolation, I could make them feel less alone. So, I wrote a film around a feeling and used what resources I had. I asked a friend if he would DP and asked Erik if he would star in it and let us use his bookstore, which was shuttered at the time due to shelter-in-place restrictions in NYC. I thought about the concept for a couple of weeks, the film began to take shape in my mind and when I sat down to write, it took a couple of hours. The next week we shot it, over two days with just my DP, Alec Cohen, on set.
The second film, Andros in the City, was a loose continuation of this story. But I wanted to show hope and especially gentleness between men, which is not something we see often. I have a lot of friends in performance and I'd been thinking a lot about how this pandemic had affected them, how devastating it was to put works, often projects people had been working on for years, on indefinite hold because theaters and audiences were gone. I thought about what it meant for an artist and was art anything without an audience? I wanted to explore these and so I cast my friend, dancer and choreographer Andros Zins-Browne in the film to play a fictionalized version of himself. Having him in the film was a real treat. He's not a trained actor (neither is Erik) but he knows how to take direction exceptionally well and he understands the position of his body within a scene. It was a real treat to get to work with a performer so dedicated to the work and also, to then have him choreograph and perform a dance.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making these films? And the easiest part?
The biggest challenge was our very limited resources, both financially and physically due to the pandemic. I only had a crew of 1-2. On the first film it was just me and Alec and on the second we also had a wonderful production assistant, Ashley Brandt, who did everything from make dinner to hold the boom, helping us get through a vigorous production schedule. Strangely, the easiest part was also the skeletal crew. I didn't have to worry about too many people on set. It's so easy when it's just 2 or 3 people, the pieces that help in seamlessly working together fall into place much faster.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I've seen two films recently that have really stuck with me. One is Klute, the 1971 film directed by Alan Pakula (starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland). It was just such a strange and wonderful pleasure to watch, the deep colors, the incredible set design, the weird plot. I really fell under its spell. Another film that I recently saw and can't stop thinking about is Attenberg the Greek 2010 film by Athina Rachel Tsangari. It was such a sparse and, again, strange film. So packed with emotion and yet somehow light on dialogue. It portrayed a father and daughter relationship unlike any I'd seen before. And Tsangari used the actor's bodies and movements in an incredibly affecting way. I can still see the shoulder movements, the laying on the bed, the walking in step of the characters.
5) What’s next for you?
I'm hoping to make a third short film in this trilogy, which is dependent on funding. I've also written a TV show that I'd like to shop around and am working on a feature script.
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nazriahi.com | IG and Twitter: @nazriahi