Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tina Gharavi. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Tina thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

Ironically, as a child my parents restricted TV. I was allowed to only watch one hour of TV. This backfired terrifically. It became a drug, an addiction. 

I would creep downstairs in the middle of the night watching films like Some Like It Hot with the sound turned right down and my face 3 inches away from the screen. I spent a childhood watching films like Deer Hunter, The Searchers… Lawrence of Arabia. I watched these dramas, soaps, and comedies and learnt the language of storytelling. I couldn’t get enough. I watched, dissected and analyzed. Why did it make me laugh? What made it powerful? Why was I crying? What didn’t I believe? How did they do that? Moving images, both film and TV, took a hold and have never let me go.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a filmmaker and screenwriter and, at times, I teach and mentor. I have often worked in very complex and challenging environments to make films. What I have experienced is just short of guerrilla warfare. Being a diverse filmmaker is about making my own opportunities and showing what I am capable of. Perhaps I made things difficult, being based in the North of England (and LA!) or perhaps not always following the straightest path. However, I always knew I was born to tell stories. As they say in Newcastle, “Shy bairns get nought” which roughly translates to “shy children don’t get nothing”… I am tenacious. 

What we know is that the universe is not made up of atoms but stories… and we are our stories. I am trying my best to get a new voice out there to change that landscape so that stories with characters and themes that relate to me can exist. Storytelling is the battle where we can exist. 

My next step is to release a mainstream feature film (a mid-budget genre film) which I am currently undertaking with BFI (about the Persian modernist poet Forough Farrokhzad)—however, I would like to work towards directing higher budget mainstream films. This has been my goal. Directing and writing drama is in my blood— I make films that grab you by the lapels and never let you go.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

This is the (brief) story of how I made my BAFTA-nominated debut feature, I am Nasrine…

12 years ago I shot my debut feature film… I remember an experienced production coordinator/line producer coming for an interview and saying, “with this budget and this script and this amount of shooting days, this is IMPOSSIBLE”. I told her she wouldn’t get the job in that case because we were going to do it…!!! and we did. Beginners’ naivety served me well. We filmed in the North-East of England and Iran… with children, asylum seekers, gypsies and horses… The film itself was shot on only £100K which was made up mostly of funds made to collect oral histories of asylum seekers and refugees and to train refugees and new entrants into the film industry. We only had enough money to shoot the film and hoped to raise finance once we completed. So, the Heads of Department had it written into their contracts that they had to train up their assistants or members of their team which they did. The fact that we were a training programme was unnoticeable as the young people on set were real firestarters…. The energy and level of commitment was out of the roof, and I put our success down in large part to this enthusiasm and the fact that asylum seekers/refugees were part of the production. This momentum and goodwill you couldn’t put a price on.

The script had been in development since 2001 when I put together a community project which consisted of training refugees/asylum seekers in filmmaking. They learnt filmmaking while I wrote the script (though I myself had left Iran in 1979, I had a lot to learn about the modern migration experience). In the first 6 months of setting up the project, the brother of one of the group members was murdered in Sunderland. This was a galvanizing event. This was the beginning of how I sought to make this film…. I knew that with the slew of hate coming from the media, we needed to humanise those seeking seekers more than ever. I knew that if people could hear that real story of migration, their daily attitudes would transform.

Making a film is hard at the best of times, but what I did was find the things I had available to me and bind them together to create the best tapestry I could. I was in love with the North East which had been my adopted home. Place and setting were important to me. I knew I had to maximize that on the screen. Everything came from knowledge and love. What we had was maximized for the screen. And truth was our co-pilot. I was lucky to find a damn good DOP in David Raedeker and also an excellent First AD, Neil Wallace… but it was a team that made that film (some good and some really bad—but that is a story for another day).

We filmed in the UK and then filmed illegally in Iran for a further week with a skeletal local crew who were also incredibly generous and supportive. I have never drank so much vodka… and for our crew in Iran, our happiness was our rebellion. And by comparison, filming in Gatehead was hard.

I learnt many lessons in making this film, but one of the most important is to find people who have your back. Really have your back because making a film is like going into a war. It’s where all loyalties and people’s metal are tested. Some of the crew are still my closest friends and collaborators even to today. Soderberg has said that directors are only refining their crew. I get that. The film was as great as we were. I am lucky to have found some special people. And I will work with them again.

When the film was completed, we went to the UK Film Council who said no. I was told the film had problems… It was heart-breaking and it would take another 12 months to raise the finance for completion. This was done by finding private equity. It was heartbreaking that after all that effort (and with a film that I knew wasn’t pants), no one in the UK film industry would help finish the film. When you ask why there aren’t diverse filmmakers or women making movies, we need to look at the decisions that lead to us not even getting a print release support from the BFI, even after the film was nominated for a BAFTA.

When the film was completed, it had a most terribly uneven reception. It was rejected from the London Film Festival and Rotterdam (damn! Were we not better than the worst film at Rotterdam) but won awards at the Brooklyn Film Festival and THEN were nominated for a BAFTA in 2013!! The film has been so well received by audiences. After the nomination, we did an incredible self-release. We took the film to audiences from Aberdeen to Sudan to Kurdistan and even small screenings in community halls and churches.

The film found its audience. It is not a perfect film by any means, I love and loathe it in equal measure… but what it did teach me is that you don’t need to wait for anyone to give you permission to tell your story. That rarely comes. And even when you have done the film, don’t wait for anyone to give you praise… It rarely comes. But just to continue to do it for the art, for the love of storytelling…. That is all there is.

Making films is not glamourous, easy or fun. It’s a blood sport and an endurance test. As I am now working on my next few features, I am reminded of the resilience and strength I needed 12 years ago to shoot this little slip of a film. If this story can help anyone who is considering making a film, then please use this experience to put wind beneath your wings and fly. Do not let anyone tell you anything is impossible or that you can’t do it. You can. You will. I did… and I will do it again. Life is short. Film is forever. 

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I actually went to school to be a painter. The idea of being a filmmaker wasn’t so direct for me. But once I was there, I picked up the camera. Before becoming a filmmaker and academic, I was trained at the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University, New Jersey (where I was mentored by artist, Martha Rosler and film historian John Belton). My minor subject remained Art History and my thesis was a documentary about artists in creative and intimate relationships, focusing on the painters Nancy Spero and Leon Golub. I completed a two-year French MA equivalent in Contemporary Art (focused on cinema) at Le Fresnoy, near Lille where I was supervised by artists Robert Kramer and Gary Hill.

I initially worked first on art installations. Sculptures using video screens and video art. Eventually, I made 8mm and 16mm films—short films, documentaries about the things around me but I was always experimenting and also curiously still somehow a painter (just with a camera). Studying art history was a big part of how I achieved my entry into film. I fell in love with painters who were early cinema makers: Caravaggio, Vermeer and Turner. What else could I be other than a painter with a camera?

The notion of ‘documentary truth’ might be best understood as being at the heart of the problem in my films. In recent years, along with the growing difficulty of distinguishing between documentary and fiction films, has come an increase in the popularity of films that celebrate the collapse of the borders between the two. ‘It is now common to read that, theoretically speaking, documentary and narrative fiction film ‘proper’ are indistinguishable as constructed realities’, (Brian McElroy). With my first feature production, I Am Nasrine, I actively sought ways of engaging the two processes; using scripted material as well as ‘snatched’ material that we would find on the day, often candid, raw elements we found in the environments where we filmed. So, in this film we see our fictional characters deliver plot, but the reality of documentary elements tells the ‘real story’ and are impactful because they are the real, the authentic, that the story is referring to. The film contains both the representation and the represented. Reality bleeds into the fiction, fortifying it.

My job is to help open up my actors, to never let them fail but enable them to find the truth that the audience craves. We develop the characters in workshops. We rehearse and find the journeys of the characters. We shape, we ask questions, and we build a composite. But importantly, I ask the actor to open themselves up, to take risks, and often to find the vulnerability in themselves. I help them embed this, soak it into them so that it never appears as a veneer. This is how we developed such rounded characters in my last film, even with such relatively inexperienced actors and non-professional actors. Dialogue is often written on set, a script is a suggestion, but the real writing happens between the actor, the camera and in that moment. My job is to enable that to flow, to be mindful of the larger arc, to pay attention to tone, pacing and ensure that the dialogue has rhythm for the film. I want to take my practice further and to a new level.

I am most proud of the fact that I can work with actors (and non-actors) to find the truth in themselves and in that moment. To knock of the edges off of the artificial. To fight the banal or pretence that can creep into a scene or a moment or a look. To find truth in the biographies of the actors who share with their characters an umbilical cord of truth.

‘Good fiction is made of what is real, and reality is difficult to come by,’ said novelist Ralph Ellison. Finding appropriate forms has been a challenge and a quest as a filmmaker; as if appropriating the dominant language can only repeat ingrained prejudices and uphold hierarchies and past-ideologies.

Experimentation therefore becomes a necessity. However, it has to be a form that communicates and does not alienate the viewer. This is the paradox of filmmaking on the margins. I am consumed by how to communicate in original tongues, to avoid the language of the dominant ideology but without alienating an audience. How to tell a story which is truthful, but which uses the ‘lies of omissions’, or construction? In a 1966 Paris Review interview, playwright Harold Pinter states clearly the author’s task, ‘One tries to get the thing…true.’ That is my goal with my body of my work.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bridgeandtunnelproductions.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/logicofthebirds/
• Other: www.tinagharavi.com

Image Credits
Main photo: Credit : Mary McCartney