Sina Khani has advice for budding filmmakers: Just do it.
“As an artist, you may have an idea to express,” says the Iranian-born director, 24, a graduate student in his first year at Virginia Commonwealth University. “But you have to practice and do short films on your own, with no budget, even if only to see if the ideas you have in mind also work for an audience.”
Khani’s black-and-white debut film, “Untitled,” was shot in his native country last year, and will be screened on May 3 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) as part of its First Features screening series. Khani says that, before he developed his debut, which cost approximately $50,000, he made a short film on his phone. “You should do that first, do it on your own, with people you are comfortable with. You’ll become more confident, and confidence is everything.”
With “Untitled,” Khani says he wanted to blur the line between surrealism and realism. The sparse plot concerns a man, Shanriar, lost in grief over the death of his father, wandering in an eerie forest with a donkey. His encounters and discoveries may be real, or not. “I think a lot of scenes come off as a question to the audience. Was that a real incident or something that goes on in the character’s mind?”
Richmond artist Dash Shaw had already conquered one medium: comic books, before trying his hand at movie directing. “I just wanted to see if I could make a film,” he says. “A lot of my first film was just to see if I could do it.”
Shaw, an Eisner-award nominee for his acclaimed “BodyWorld” comic series, released his debut film, “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea,” in 2016, the same year he and his animator wife Jane Saborski moved from Brooklyn to Richmond. The film, and a short that he made in 2011, “Wheel Of Fortune,” will screen at the ICA on May 8 as part of the First Features series.
Utilizing the big-time voice talents of actors Jason Schwartzman, Susan Sarandon and Lena Dunham, “My Entire High School…” which he and Samborski financed on their own, is an entertaining fantasy about a student named Dash who may, or may not, be facing a watery crisis. But Shaw says the animated film isn’t necessarily autobiographical.
“I did want to be a writer and a cartoonist and I did work at the school paper and those are plot points in the movie. But it’s taken to an absurd degree. The main character is an unreliable narrator who has kind of crafted himself to be the hero of this situation, and the way everything looks and sounds amplifies the character’s emotional space, as with the use of abstract expressionist backgrounds. At that age, the emotions are more heightened than they are later, and being embarrassed is maybe a little extra horrible.”
Shaw employs a less-is-more attitude when it comes to his vibrant so-called “limited” animation. “I’m trying to take the limitations and make them assets,” he says. “There are fewer drawings but the drawings are better or more idiosyncratic. A great example is the ‘Charlie Brown Christmas Special,’ a huge inspiration. It’s a very low-budget cartoon but you wouldn’t ask it to have a bigger budget, you don’t want the Peanuts characters to look any different than they do. The animators are getting at something more powerful by harnessing the limited means.”
Shaw, whose latest comic, “Blurry,” is slated for release in August through the New York Review of Comics, has already made a follow-up animated feature, “Cryptozoo,” currently streaming on Hulu. Among other accolades, the film was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the 2021 Independent Spirit Awards (he and Samborski are currently working on a third film, a dark fantasy). The 41-year-old animator is excited about the ICA screening of his debut because of its big screen. “‘High School Sinking’ is really a spectacle experience. I made something big to be seen big. An environment like that is the best way to see it.”
“The series is really about bringing together a sense of community around what it means to embark on your first feature-length film,” says First Features programmer Yossara Bouchtia, assistant professor in VCU’s Cinema program and a respected filmmaker in her own right. “[We are] peeling back the curtain of the creative process that it entails. We’re currently focusing on local Richmond talent and plan to expand to filmmakers across the country and world.” Each screening, she adds, will be accompanied by a Q&A where the filmmakers can field questions on the ins and outs of navigating a debut feature.
“Making it a feature film was a very hard decision to make but I was so determined,” says Khani. “Looking back at it, it was a hard experience going through long production, and searching for money for post production. But in the end, it made me comfortable and made me more confident in my work.” He’s currently working on two more film scripts, one a very complicated, plot-driven period drama. “It is very different from this first film, where the plot is not so important.”
Shaw is hesitant to give advice, but he says that he tells new directors that the moviemaking experience is hard for everyone. “You aren’t doing anything wrong.” In the end, you simply have to make your own way with what you have. “This is independent cinema. We don’t want Jean-Luc Godard to have $10 million dollars and make movies like Michael Bay. We like it when Godard is shooting movies with his friends.”
“Untitled” by Sina Khani will screen at the ICA on Friday, May 3 at 7 p.m. “My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea” by Dash Shaw will screen, along with Shaw’s short film, “Wheel of Fortune,” at the ICA on May 8 at 7 p.m. Both events are free and will be followed by Q&A sessions with the filmmakers. Reserve tickets at icavcu.org.
