“1001 Frames,” which premiered at the Thessaloniki Film Festival this week, consists of a series of eerie scenes from auditions in Tehran, Iran. But it can happen in any city.
During auditions, aspiring actors are asked to improvise scenes such as becoming a cat, being locked in a room, or being suggested by a famous director. In fact, the last thing theater wannabes eventually discover is the real deal. At this point the movie skews into a horror movie.
At the audition, actors are told that the movie they are auditioning for is inspired by “One Thousand and One Nights” (also known as “Arabian Nights”). In an Arabian folk tale, the central character, Scheherazade, must entertain her captive king by telling him stories to keep him from being killed.
American-Iranian film director Mehrnoush Alia came up with the idea after a conversation with an Iranian friend. “A friend I knew was trying to become an actress and she was in a similar situation,” she says. “She was told, ‘This is what you have to do to get roles.’ So she gave up acting, got married very young, and became a very depressed woman. Her life changed, as if she were a different person. So I saw how killing someone’s dreams completely changes them.”
When she moved to the United States and attended Berkeley and Columbia as a film school graduate, she says, “There were a lot of audition rooms and hundreds of applications for my own student films, my friends’ student films, films by students who weren’t getting paid and didn’t really know what they were doing.”
“And being in a position of power and just sitting on the other side of the camera when they walk into the room, being very vulnerable and they’re opening themselves up, but as someone who’s always on the other side, it felt very uncomfortable. I think I had some kind of empathy for them because I grew up in Iran, which is obviously a very dominant culture, like my mother is very dominant.”
It also reminded her of the Iranian film Salam Cinema, directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, made 30 years ago. When she was a child, she saw this movie in a theater with her father in Iran and it had a huge impact on her.
“It happens in the audition room, too. This very famous film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, was at the height of his career, and he put out an ad in the newspaper for auditions, and thousands of people showed up, and he put up a fight. The way he did that really showed the power of cinema and how desperate people were. The movie starts with this long tracking shot, and the application form. You can see it being thrown into the air and people jumping up and down to grab it and fighting over the document. And in the movie, the director was constantly telling the actors, now you’re going to cry, you’re going to sing, you’re going to dance, and all that. I remember feeling very uncomfortable in that movie theater. It was a very fun movie, but at the same time I felt very uncomfortable because of this power.”
During her student days, she began writing films that she wanted “to be told from the point of view of an audition camera.” Because I thought that that gaze, that male gaze, has been seen since the beginning of film history. That was scary for me. Because you can see how vulnerable the actors and actresses feel when they walk into the room. It also reminded me of when I was young, walking through the streets of Tehran. The men just stared at you, scanning you. I felt that it was a cultural thing and that all men had the right to do so, so I decided to use that to focus on the discomfort that people feel in front of the camera. ”
A further twist in the film is that the man playing the director is Alia’s partner, Mohammad Aghebati, a theater director in Tehran. Most of the aspiring actresses in this film are played by his students who have done improvisation, so he knows their limits and is also the film’s casting director. “I knew a lot about them because we always hung out together, so I knew them socially,” she said.
“This character is completely different from who he is as a person. He thought he had to be very aggressive, and I had to keep telling him that he shouldn’t be that way, because he was excited about the role. He really hated his character. So I think he was hiding behind this aggression. But he was starting out from an aggressive standpoint. I was like, ‘No, there’s not usually that kind of aggression in situations like this, at least not at first.’ ‘But he didn’t understand it. I had to keep reminding him that he needed to be a player. He was actually one of the most difficult people to direct because he’s a theater director and a very good director, but directors are hard to direct. ”
When she showed the film, she said she felt it evoked a strong reaction in the audience, reminding women and men alike of unpleasant situations.
“Women and men come up to me, and a lot of them thank me, because they say they’ve had similar experiences. Some of them are in tears, and you can feel the emotion in the room. In the US, we recently screened the film for 18- and 19-year-old film school freshmen at the University of North Carolina, and it was really interesting to see how American audiences resonated with the film.”
“I heard that 10 women were crying in the bathroom. Afterwards, students lined up to talk to me. Men and women shared their opinions. The men I spoke to said they had experienced similar situations. But some of the women actually dug deeper into the situation. You know, this… It’s been really interesting to see how the work has gained trust. Some of them said this is a story they’ve never told anyone. So it was really interesting to see how it gained trust and earned them.”So that whole storytelling part is interesting. ”
