Many North American independent filmmakers since the 1990s, somewhere or other, have cited Zahedi as an influence. His list of fans includes Richard Linklater, Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig, the Safdie brothers, Joanna Arnow, Zia Anger and John Wilson. It’s not hard to see what they enjoy in Zahedi. He is the great—or at least the most extreme—confessionalist of American film. In a sprawling oeuvre of no-budget hybrid personal documentaries he’s made since the early 1990s comprising feature films, shorts, web series, YouTube videos and podcasts, he has revealed more of himself to the camera than most people ever do, even privately. Honesty is the highest ideal in the Zahedi universe—something he reiterates many times—and by adhering to it via a signature mix of documentary and dramatic techniques including direct-to-camera addresses, vérité footage and reenactments, he has created a genuinely trailblazing oeuvre, one that demolishes taboos not out of wanton transgression but a sincere desire to be known and accepted and loved.
Zahedi’s masterpiece—the purest distillation of his art to date—is his series The Show About the Show. Convoluted, meta, scandalous, sexy, tragic, and maybe ultimately redemptive, the conceit of the show is that each episode is about the making of the previous episode. In episode one, Zahedi pitches non-profit Brooklyn-based TV network BRIC on a lighthearted scripted show about sex in Brooklyn called Daisy Chain, which the network rejects in favour of The Show About the Show; episode two centres on the reenactment of a story about a threesome told during the making of that episode; episode three goes behind the scenes of episode two to question Zahedi’s motives, techniques and ethics.
From there, things quickly become slippery. Reenactments are sometimes, but not always, performed by the very people involved in the original events as people decide they no longer want to be involved or, just as often, resolutely demand to be in the show. At some points, multiple actors play the same role. Timelines become hard to pin down. Ultimately, all that’s holding the thing together is Zahedi’s voice. He explains everything in neurotic, riffy, gossipy, philosophical direct-to-camera addresses—a second-generation American, son of Iranian immigrants, he is often called the Iranian Woody Allen. Things also quickly become dramatic. By the end of season two, Zahedi’s marriage has acrimoniously collapsed, he’s gotten himself involved in an ill-advised affair with a fan and he’s almost lost his job at the New School for filming himself smoking weed with students.
To date, two seasons of the show have been released officially but POV was lucky enough to attend a work-in-progress screening of the concluding season this March in London, UK. By the end of the screening, we were convinced that the entire project is a mock-epic Gesamtkunstwerk to stand alongside Curb Your Enthusiasm in its ruthless existential comedy and The Mother and the Whore in its sheer raw vulnerability.
The big question with Zahedi is how, despite his singular and widely praised oeuvre, he is substantially, and by his own repeated, ritualistic admission, a failure. Zahedi’s fame, much as he craves it, pales in comparison to those of many of his (admitted, ostensible or erstwhile) admirers like Lena Dunham and Nathan Fielder, and, in the kind of cruel irony that attaches to everything Zahedi does, largely derives from a 2019 New York Times Magazine profile bearing the title, “A Filmmaker Bared His Soul. It Ruined His Life.”
The title is apt. All of Zahedi’s work is dedicated to the proposition that honesty is the best strategy—not necessarily because it will improve his life in material terms (far from it) but because he can’t seem to live with himself if he’s anything but completely authentic, even if this means saying and doing things that cause immense pain to himself and everyone around him.
The true valence of what Zahedi means by honesty isn’t quite as naïve as it seems, though—or maybe more so. He is perfectly aware that he is playing a role when he appears in his films and that he is complicit in creating meaning in them, controlling the message through his storytelling and editing. Still, he adheres to the honesty ideal as far as possible. The limit case of this is in a 45-minute-long episode of season three of The Show, which is almost entirely given over to a direct-to-camera monologue by his former lover, Ashley. In excruciating detail, she tells the entire story of her relationship with Caveh from her point of view. She says she never wanted to be romantically involved with him at all; she just wanted to work on his films. She says she felt pressured to have sex with him throughout their involvement. She says that her affair with Caveh destroyed her relationship with her ex, the one she really loved. She says she blames herself for breaking up Zahedi’s family and the guilt made her suicidal. In the most devastating moment, she says she called Zahedi when she was feeling suicidal and he said, gnomically, that it wouldn’t be the worst thing if she did kill herself. Periodically, throughout the monologue, the film cuts to show Zahedi directing her—get to the point, talk about this or that, etc. Still, Ashley is in control, and she takes no prisoners.
Discussing The Show with POV after the screening, Zahedi disputes some of the details of Ashley’s account. But in the series, at least as it stands now, he lets her vent and leaves all her accusations and rationalizations—portraying him as a toxic, manipulative bully-cum-New Age cult leader—hanging in the air. Ashley’s dramatic confession is only lightly undercut at the beginning of the following episode, when, in vérité behind-the-scenes footage, she admits that there were good parts in their relationship while Zahedi maintains that it’s better—as in, better TV—that she didn’t mention them.
Much of the time, Zahedi’s commitment to honesty seems like calculated taboo-pushing. We often see Zahedi transforming himself into an on-camera alter ego in a way analogous to Woody Allen or Larry David, playing up his most neurotic, horny and jealous sides for the benefit of the camera. Or maybe it’s the other way around, with the camera allowing him to be his true self. In any case, the more uncomfortable and embarrassing the situation, the better. Take for example this characteristic exchange between Caveh and his wife Mandy in The Show About the Show:
Mandy: Caveh! Don’t put that in there!
Caveh: Why not?
Mandy: That is, like, so embarrassing!
Caveh: I know. That’s why it’s good.
Or take I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore. In this film, the thirty-something Zahedi pressures his sexagenarian father and teenaged half-brother into doing ecstasy with him in a Las Vegas hotel room as a sort of bonding exercise, to be filmed by a tiny and largely inept team of Zahedi’s friends. One feels that Zahedi is completely sincere in wanting to bond with his family; one also feels deeply uncomfortable with how he pressures them to join him.
Dwelling in these moments and milking them for all they’re worth is Zahedi’s raison d’être. In I Was Possessed By God, he does a heroic dose of what appears to be ayahuasca in a hotel room and has a religious experience. Who among us has not thought of filming ourselves on drugs, only to think better of it? No such caveats for Caveh. In I Am A Sex Addict, Zahedi matter-of-factly confesses to several infidelities, uncomfortable couple power dynamics and ultimately an obsession with prostitutes. Some will see this as seedy and juvenile. It is. It’s also easy to see how the creators of Girls, Uncut Gems, i hate myself 🙂, and How To with John Wilson saw a sort of kindred spirit in Zahedi.
Above all, Zahedi is refreshingly honest about failure. Much of his work purports to be about making films; in fact, it’s often more about Zahedi’s failure to make the film or show he intended to create. Money is always a problem. In an early scene in I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, Zahedi is forced to negotiate with his half-brother Amin over payment; eventually their father makes up the difference out of his own pocket. In The Show About the Show, Zahedi often complains that he can’t pay his credit card bill.
Throughout The Sheik and I, which gently satirises the sheik of Sharjah and certain ritual elements of Islam, the spectre of violence hangs over the filmmaker. Almost no one agrees to take part in the film and Zahedi is worried that once the film is released, he’ll end up being killed, like Theo Van Gogh. By the end of the film, the curators who commissioned it have disowned it, bemused at the realization that behind Zahedi’s Iranian name is a very American bluster with no quarter for tact or compromise when it comes to free speech. The worst part—as Zahedi explains in a YouTube video, “I Was Blacklisted By Thom Powers”—came after the film was completed, when he tried to get the film into festivals. Powers, Zahedi alleges, led a campaign among programmers and journalists to blacklist the film from festivals and to poison critical coverage of it. [As per Indiewire and a subsequent interview with Filmmaker, Powers’ response related to concerns about documentary ethics in The Sheik and I that could potentially lead to harm. Zahedi admitted to Filmmaker that he capitalized on the controversy for marketing purposes, while nobody was harmed.]
Zahedi’s failures have something to do with the scale of his ambition. Our conversation turned at some point to his favourite filmmakers. We expected to hear that he was influenced by pioneers of the personal documentary like Ross McElwee. Instead, Zahedi told us that he idolizes Lars Von Trier, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky and Woody Allen, and has always aspired to reach that tier of greatness, not through replicating their styles but by creating one that is equally distinctive and incisive. This was never going to be easy, least of all for somebody as unwilling or unable to play the industry schmooze game as Zahedi. It’s a testament to his skill and perseverance that, with The Show About The Show, he has created something on that tier.
Still, one can’t help but notice that, in the films themselves—and in The Show About the Show—Zahedi keeps pitching scripts for films that sound like comedies or dramas but can’t get them greenlit or funded. He has been forced by dint of circumstance to invent the hybrid documentary- monologue-reenactment mode that has become his trademark.
In the conversation with POV, Zahedi confirmed this and told us that he had to learn to “trust reality.” When he made, I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, he wasn’t at that point yet, which is why he brought the ecstasy pills—to “help reality along”—only to discover that reality didn’t necessarily need helping. (In that film, he also says that he hates documentaries.)
All that honesty, all that failure, all that conflict and pain. One is left, at the end of all of Zahedi’s movies and shows, with the question: was it worth it? This question gets at the very nature of Zahedi’s project. Zahedi considers his films an extension of himself, an expression of his uniqueness. He told POV: “One thing (Canadian filmmaker) Matt Johnson said to my class—it was the best thing I’ve ever heard anyone say as advice to filmmakers—was that there’s a film that everyone has inside them that only they can make. People have vibrational frequencies, and everyone has a different frequency. I’m just really trying to not just express my frequency but experience my frequency.”
This led Zahedi to talk to POV about religion and redemption. Speaking about I Am a Sex Addict, he said, “I felt like it would redeem all of the suffering that I had experienced and caused.” Concerning In the Bathtub of the World, he said, “How do you redeem ordinary life? How do you make everything seem interesting and valuable and beautiful and funny?” In short, life needs to be redeemed, elevated somehow, brought onto a spiritual or abstract or philosophical level out of the mundanity of the everyday. For Zahedi that happens through the very public medium of film.
It might seem incongruous to see Zahedi—the guy you see getting blowjobs from prostitutes, bullying his father and half-brother into doing a drug they clearly don’t want to do, imagining every girl he meets wanting to sleep with him, complaining about being penniless far beyond the age that such poverty could possibly be seen as cute and sexy, making flailing and ultimately doomed attempts at careerist schmoozing, and generally falling flat on his face at almost every turn—as ultimately a spiritual filmmaker. But that is what he is. It’s there in the title of his ayahuasca movie: I Was Possessed By God. It’s there at the end of season three of The Show, which—if memory serves—contains a version of a sermon he gives regularly about how we’re all emanations of God.
It’s there, too, when POV puts it to him that there is a family resemblance between Zahedi’s work and that of Iranian filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami. “I started doing this kind of thing before I discovered Iranian cinema,” Zahedi tells us. “The first one I saw was Close Up, I remember being gob smacked. I was like, this guy is exactly on my wavelength. How is it that we’re both Iranian? Is there some kind of genetic predisposition to this? Is it in my DNA? What the fuck? And then I saw more stuff—and there’s a lot of it! And I was just like, oh my god, I feel like I am one of those guys. But I just got lost in the diaspora and I didn’t know. I do belong to a tradition. I was just cut off from it.”
Zahedi’s way to God—whatever he means by that—is through honesty so radical that it amounts to throwing himself into a state of abjection, thereby bypassing and transcending all societal injunctions and perceptions to commune unmediated with divine energies. It might not look holy to everybody. Women certainly will find a lot to dislike in his often-manipulative behaviour; the Q&A after the U.K. Prince Charles Cinema screening was downright hostile, with the interviewer—filmmaker Desiree Akhavan—criticising Zahedi for interpreting women’s interest as sexual when in fact many just want to work with him. Fair enough—this is not an unanswerable judgment but there’s merit to it. (Zahedi reassured POV that he and Akhavan are friends.) But we find ourselves wanting to follow Zahedi on his journey. His authenticity is compelling. His work’s moral messiness is its own reward; it feels true to life in a way that kneejerk political judgments don’t.
Zahedi often refers to himself as a holy fool or court jester. There’s something to that. But something clicked when reading the observation that Zahedi was avant-garde. In military terms, the avant-garde is often a suicide mission—send a few guys out to take the enemy heat so that the rest of the army can establish a better position. This is Zahedi’s role to a T. He is the forlorn hope of American film, sending himself out of the trenches and over the top even when everybody—literally everybody—is telling him not to, in quixotic hopes of fame and fortune and soulful connection and salvation through art and authenticity—or at least getting laid. Nobody goes as far as him, but many follow in his wake.
