In advance of BFF’s 2020 Online Festival, we will be sharing exclusive interviews with this year’s filmmakers. Get to know their films, their inspirations, and their advice to fellow emerging filmmakers. Check out our interview with Mahsa Razavi, director of A CELEBRATION.
Mahsa Razavi studied Sociology in Iran before moving to Canada where she earned her MFA in Film Production. She has made several short films that have been showcased in many festivals around the globe. Mahsa’s works often focus on issues of gender, identity politics and immigration experience. Her characters who are not usually represented on screen live in the margins of society and search for a better life and place in the world.
Congratulations on your 2020 BFF film selection! Can you tell us a bit about your film?
A Celebration is a short drama about 8-year-old Ada living with her newly immigrated mother in Toronto, as they try to stay out of trouble and make ends meet. This is also the story of a young girl’s struggle to dissociate herself from the protecting identity of her mother in order to recreate her identity in a land other than her motherland.
What inspired you to tell this story?
The film is inspired by my childhood memories as well as some of my friends’ experiences of being born and grew up in immigrant families in Canada.
Still from A Celebration
Your main character Ada confronts the very real challenges of young immigrant kids who receive and absorb messages telling them what it means to belong and what it means to stick out. What made you decide to build this story between a mother and daughter specifically?
I think the mother-daughter relationship is the most original and yet the most challenging relationship that a woman, regardless of her age or nationality, experiences throughout her life.
The dynamic of mother and daughter relationship has always intrigued me both literally and metaphorically. I think a woman’s relationship with her mother is in a sense reminiscent of one’s relationship with her homeland.
As an immigrant, I always love my motherland dearly but I’m also against some of its regressive and burdening rules and beliefs, so I decided to get distance from it to be able to explore other worlds and to see things from a wider angle, a higher perspective.
Still from A Celebration
What’s the core message that you wanted to convey to your audience through this film?
The film supports diversity and respecting one’s unique identity and the background against conformity and the cultural assimilation that I believe is promoted by capitalism.
What’s next for you?
I am currently working on my first feature film titled Snowbirds, which is about two women of diversity in Toronto and inspired by my mother’s relationship with my nanny back in the 80s. The story is very close to my heart and I’m very excited about it.
What advice would you give to an emerging filmmaker just starting out?
My advice to emerging filmmakers is to read and watch as much as they can and to look within themselves and draw on their personal experiences to be able to tell authentic stories. Also, constantly observe people and events around them to be able to realize the world within and around their characters.
Care to share any films you’re inspired by, that our community should check out during this quarantine?
In this particular film, I was inspired mostly by coming of age films with strong child characters such as Raise the Ravens by the Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, The Spirit of the Beehive by Victor Erice, and of course Abbas Kiarostami’s films.
Catch A CELEBRATION as part of BFF’s 2020 Online Festival, screening in Shorts Program: From the Outside. Join us June 25 - 28 for screenings, virtual Q&As, panel discussions and more! Get Tickets Today.