Caveh Zahedi: An American Cinematheque Tribute

ABOUT THE SERIES:

The American Cinematheque is thrilled to welcome filmmaker Caveh Zahedi for an in-person tribute, as part of the third annual ‘This Is Not a Fiction’ festival, celebrating a body of work that pushes the boundaries between reality, performance and cinema to the point of convergence. Across his projects, Zahedi has undertaken an ambitious and deeply personal project: to document his life with such extreme honesty that it becomes both the subject and the method of the work. The result is one of the most transgressive and profoundly human filmographies in contemporary independent cinema.

Zahedi’s emergence as one of the most distinctive voices in film began with I DON’T HATE LAS VEGAS ANYMORE, a road film conceived as an attempt to prove the existence of God on a trip to Las Vegas with his Iranian-born father and teenage half-brother. Trusting reality to shape the film, the project captures the tension between truth and performance, especially as Zahedi begins to intervene when the premise falters. Across a year of one-minute recordings, IN THE BATHTUB OF THE WORLD finds Zahedi attempting to “redeem” everyday life, using the act of filming to lift it out of the mundane. With I AM A SEX ADDICT, he pushes this confessional style even further, examining his own compulsions and relationships through a blend of reenactment and direct address. Across these works, Zahedi consistently blurs documentary and fiction in pursuit of a higher, more exacting honesty.

This pursuit reaches its most ambitious and destabilizing form in THE SHOW ABOUT THE SHOW, from which we’ll be screening Season 3, which tracks the making of the Season 2, spiraling into a self-reflexive look at authorship and the risks of putting your life on screen. Join us for a tribute series spanning his work, as reality and film begin to mirror one another.

Special thank you to STATE8 and Sam Thompson.