 |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Caveh and Woody Allen, 1967
|
Caveh Zahedi began making films while studying philosophy at Yale University. After graduating, he went to Switzerland to try to work with Jean-Luc Godard, but Godard refused to meet with him after he phoned Godard at three in the morning to offer his filmmaking services. Disappointed, Caveh returned to the United States and got a job trying to teach video to autistic children. When fellow workers started mistaking him for one of the autists, Caveh quit his job and moved to Paris to try to raise money for a film about French poet Arthur Rimbaud. He failed to raise even one centime, and soon returned to the U.S. to try to make the film in Super-8 with no money. The result was a complete disaster, and he decided to give up filmmaking and devote himself exclusively to collage-making instead. But after several lonely months of collage-making, his desire to make films returned, and he began work on a film about the turn-of-the-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. He moved back to France to try to interest French television in the project but failed once again. Dejected, he eventually abandoned the Muybridge project in order to devote himself to an experimental music video of a Talking Heads song. The music video, which took him two years to complete, was subsequently rejected by David Byrne. Discouraged but undeterred, he applied for and received a modest grant from the French government for a filmic adaptation of an obscure prose poem by the French poet Stephane Mallarme. The film took him another two years to complete and when he showed the final cut to the funding committee, they voted to discontinue funding the film. Abandoning his dream of being embraced by the French film community, he applied to UCLA film school and moved to Los Angeles, in the hope of making more commercially viable films. At UCLA, he met and began collaborating with Greg Watkins. Together, they co-directed A Little Stiff, an experimental narrative in which he re-enacted his unrequited love for a UCLA art student, using the real-life participants. Surprisingly, the film premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival, won widespread critical acclaim, and aired on both German television and the Sundance Channel. Caveh’s next film, I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, was an attempt to prove the existence of God by means of a road trip to Las Vegas with his Iranian-born father and teenage half-brother. His premise is that if God exists, God will provide whatever events are needed to make the film compelling. But when the film doesn’t seem to be going his way, Caveh resorts to plan B, which involves persuading his father and half-brother to take Ecstasy with him on film. Although virulently panned by most American critics and a box office disaster, the film won the Critics’ Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival and went on to develop a cult following. Caveh’s next film, In the Bathtub of the World, was a one-year video diary. The idea was to record one minute of each day for an entire year, and edit the footage down to ninety minutes. The film aired on the Independent Film Channel and was released on DVD. Caveh's
latest project is I Am A Sex Addict.
|
