In this blog, Orla Smith and Kimia Ipakchi, the curators behind Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend, share the unusual and impactful ways they created space for discourse during a recent tour with filmmaker Caveh Zahedi. By placing audience commentary on equal footing with Zahedi’s work, attendees were empowered to interrogate controversial elements of the films, share personal reflections, and get involved to a greater extent than a traditional Q&A would ever allow.
Last summer, we started our film festival, The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend (CNFW), in the hopes of exciting UK audiences about the infinite possibilities of what a documentary can be. Given the small ecosystem for unconventional documentary in the UK, we’ve faced the challenge of getting audiences to think outside of the pretty narrow box that documentaries are often placed within.
So, with that in mind, we embarked on a pretty ambitious project this March: a sort-of off-season series of events with nonfiction provocateur Caveh Zahedi. Zahedi has spent three decades documenting his life in intense detail. His work is polarising because of how utterly committed he is to it, seemingly above all else, including the privacy of his (now ex) wife, his two children, and everyone else in his life.
Bringing Zahedi to the UK was a way to shake things up. His films venture so far into the realm of the ‘personal’ that we hoped it might activate an interest in audiences who hadn’t encountered work like this before, encouraging them to explore personal documentary further. Along with programming partners Electric Blue (for events in London) and Paul Farrell (for events in Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham), we arranged for Zahedi to fly from New York for a week-long UK tour.
We approached the tour as a collaboration, with a box office split between filmmaker and curators, and we were able to earn back the expenses of the trip through ticket sales. With an event every day for eight days, undertaken with zero budget, it was a DIY feat, made possible by the fact that Zahedi owns the rights to all of his films. Our two bookending screenings of The Show About the Show at the Prince Charles Cinema made up the majority of the box office, allowing us and our programming partners the flexibility to experiment and price more accessibly for all the events held in between.
These screenings offered us a unique and thrilling opportunity to present boundary-pushing work to audiences, but it was also a crash course in how to responsibly present controversial and potentially upsetting material. We experienced this first at the inaugural edition of our festival last year, where the film Miguel’s War (Eliane Raheb, 2021) — in which a gay Lebanese expat living in Spain recounts past traumas and guilt — left some audience members upset and angry. Without the distancing layer of fiction, the audience’s emotional response to a “character’s” moral complexity was incredibly intense, and for some, inextricable from the morals of the filmmaking itself.
Working with Zahedi, we were confronted with this to an intense degree. Zahedi’s confrontational honesty in The Show About the Show tends to provoke a range of reactions from viewers, particularly his tendency to openly express and pursue sexual attraction to his female collaborators and fans, a dynamic which, as depicted in his work, has resulted in emotionally fraught and arguably power-imbalanced relationships. For us, it was crucial to open up space for criticism in our post-screening discussions, so that we weren’t creating an environment where those power dynamics could be replicated without commentary or pushback. After eight screenings of his work, we learned a lot about what does and doesn’t work when it comes to making an audience feel safe, comfortable, and empowered to receive and discuss controversial work such as this.
Case study: Creating space for audience discourse at an interactive screening in Leeds
Perhaps the greatest triumph of the programme was ‘The Screening About the Screening’, an interactive screening of The Show About the Show: Season 1 at Headingley Enterprise and Arts Centre in Leeds. This was the brainchild of Rat Depot, who we collaborated with on this event. Their concept was to ‘explode’ the traditional idea of Q&A in a way that was experimental, totally untested, but so original and exciting that we just had to make it happen. A camera would be set up in an adjacent room to the screening, so that in between episodes, audience members could enter the room and perform ‘camera addresses’ that would be projected live onto the screen. Camera addresses are Zahedi’s signature formal device: most of his films or shows are framed by him narrating into the lens, talking directly to us.
We brought our tech lead, Nick Bush, up to Leeds with us and, in a flurry of action, managed to get the tech working just in time. Without extensive budget or time to perform tests in situ prior to the screening, we were running on prayers and a trust in Nick’s technical expertise. While Nick prepared the tech, our team and Rat Depot’s laid out the room with ‘cabaret-style’ seating: instead of rows of chairs facing the front, small tables were laid out with a few chairs around each. Paper and pens were placed on each table, so that if someone was too shy to perform their thoughts to camera, they could anonymously write them down for Rat Depot’s Paulie to perform on their behalf.
The audience filtered in and the night began. After initial nerves about how readily people would participate, the event flourished into something strange and powerful. Immersive screenings can sometimes become gimmicky, or interactive for the sake of being interactive. Here, the distance created by the camera addresses — literally bringing the audience to a separate room, so they could express their questions or comments separate from the watching eyes of the audience or filmmaker — enabled a different level of honesty.
Interestingly, it was more confrontational between the audience and Caveh than most of the screenings we ran over the course of the week. Some were curious about certain aspects of the show and asked Zahedi questions; some were moved to share personal reflections; and others explained why they felt his behaviour and filmmaking was misogynistic — either speaking as themselves or through the anonymous written notecards. When he was moved to do so, Zahedi would enter the room himself, either to answer a question or to challenge a comment he had just heard.
By placing the audience members up on the screen, we mounted them on the same pedestal as the artist, empowering them to see themselves as just as worthy of self-expression as Zahedi. While in a traditional Q&A, some might groan at the inevitable ‘this is more of a comment than a question’, here, all bets were off. Everyone was primed and curious to hear what other audience members wanted to share about themselves as well as about the work, because their musings actually became a part of the work. Some got creative with it: one audience member, while reflecting on the dizzying layers of self-reflexivity in The Show About the Show, placed his smartphone in between himself and the camera, so that the image of him in his phone was what the camera broadcast to us, rather than the camera capturing him directly. Here, making art and watching art became one fluid process that everyone in the room could participate in. Whether they loved, loathed, or were conflicted by Zahedi’s practice, the audience felt engaged rather than alienated, and empowered to speak their minds either for or against the work on screen.
What we learned from our week with Caveh Zahedi
Over the course of our week with Caveh Zahedi, the interactive experiment in Leeds was the most successful instance of drawing the audience into a thrilling dialogue with difficult and polarising material. This was reflected in our audience survey responses: several people called the screening “thought provoking”, and perhaps the greatest compliment of all was that it “prompted discussion in the pub after”.
Interestingly, an audience member who didn’t attend the Leeds screening but who came to one of our London showings wrote: “I would have liked to ask stuff at the Q&A but I didn’t want to be put in a Caveh film. Maybe an anonymous way to ask a question would have been cool.” Having actually implemented this in Leeds — one of Rat Depot’s many brilliant suggestions — we saw how the opportunity for anonymity opened up the floor and gave the audience confidence to ‘go there’. One audience member even submitted an anonymous question in the first half of the screening, and then later got up in front of the camera, emboldened to do so by seeing the dialogue unfold over the course of the screening. This was a valuable lesson in how the chosen format of a screening can really determine the ways — and sometimes the extent to which — audience members engage with a film.
Another lesson learned was timing. We thought that three hours for the Leeds screening would be enough to get through approximately 110 minutes of material, plus audience interaction. However, on top of technical troubleshooting slightly delaying the start time, we soon realised that the audience had way more to say than we had time to accommodate. It took a while for people to warm up to the concept, but by the end, they had really hit their stride, and it’s a shame to think of where the conversation could have gone if we’d had extra time to play with.
We had created an environment for audience members to engage with and even criticise the work, but we underestimated how long some members might take to feel comfortable in confronting what they saw in such a public way. Specifically, it was only in the final hour of the screening where an audience member posed the question of whether Zahedi’s filmmaking practice is misogynistic — followed by Zahedi entering the camera room to challenge that idea, and to challenge the audience to explain the accusation further. At that point, there was only really time for one further audience retort before the screening wrapped up.
It was evident that, given enough time, there was a clear appetite among the audience to push further and go deeper. It’s easy to underestimate the willingness of audiences to engage with the work in such an active way, but what we’ve learned is that if you give them time to fill, and create an environment where they feel comfortable speaking, they will fill that time enthusiastically.
The value of immersive screenings
Needless to say, screening polarising work is not an easy feat, and arguably, it would have been ‘safer’ to just not do it. But this goes against what we believe as curators: that work which evokes a strong emotional response (good or bad) is something to further explore, not shy away from. This is a broader testament to the power of documentary itself. Without the safe distance of fiction, nonfiction material can be uncomfortable and confrontational, but we screen this work because we feel those conversations need to be had. We’re still learning how to create a nurturing space for those conversations to happen.
We left the whole experience eager to bring interactivity into our screening work where possible and where appropriate. Zahedi’s The Show About the Show was a perfect fit for this format — not everything will be. But it’s worth always asking, with every screening: is there a way, big or small, that we can collapse the boundary between the audience and the art, in order to bring the two into closer conversation? If art can create space for a public forum, then that’s a reason for people to watch work together, in a cinema — allowing us all to understand ourselves, each other, and the world we live in a little better.
Orla Smith and Kimia Ipakchi are filmmakers and curators based in London. Together, they run The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend, a film festival that celebrates everything documentary can and should be. You can follow the festival on Instagram at @cnfw_uk.
All photo credits: Orla Smith and Kimia Ipakchi