The Cupertino Courier
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Photograph by Fang H. Liang
And...Action!: Mohammad Gorjestani's short film 'The Shade' is set to screen at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
Iranian-born director jump-starts his career
By Cody Kraatz
A boy named Amin sells brightly colored balloons beside an Iranian country road, yearning patiently for some ice cream.
A well-dressed city dweller gets a flat tire, and has to figure out how to get to Tehran.
The heat weighs down on everyone, a yellow hue reflected off the dusty road.
"I wanted people to see the boy's struggle as just as or more significant than the man's struggle," says director and writer Mohammad Gorjestani, a former Cupertino High School wrestler.
"The reason we don't acknowledge it as significant is because we don't relate to it. They are one and the same, just as important as each other."
His 12-minute short, The Shade, is up for best short, best director and best original screenplay at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It was selected with 200 others from a field of 4,500 entries.
The film is scheduled to screen five times, and Gorjestani will be there to answer questions, represent his film and network with producers and other filmmakers. He has been invited to an April 30 lunch that actor Robert DiNiro, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, is expected to attend.
Gorjestani, who grew up watching his parents paint, first chose photography, taking some classes at De Anza College. But the craft just didn't satisfy him.
"It was frustrating because the artist is in debt to the photograph. The environment was as much responsible for the picture as I was. Film allows you to create your own world or parallel universe if you do it right. That was definitely what was appealing to me," he says.
His devotion to film was piqued in a De Anza College film class taught by Susan Tavernetti.
"A screenplay like this takes perfect execution, and he really pulled it off," says Tavernetti, also a film reviewer for local newspapers and a judge at San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival.
Tavernetti praises Gorjestani. "He was a dream student, intellectually curious, always enthusiastic and really hard-working. He seemed so passionate about film."
After De Anza, Gorjestani went to Vancouver Film School, where he entered the film production program.
Gorjestani worked on The Shade throughout the one-year program and then submitted it to the faculty, which picked it for production and later entered it in Tribeca.
Gorjestani was born in Iran but grew up in the United States. His father grew up in the United States, but returned to Iran to teach art at the University of Tehran. The family immigrated here in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war to find better opportunities.
"My last memories of Iran are eating a big dinner with my family and being in an underground bomb shelter while missile sirens were going off," says Gorjestani, 23.
He says he aimed for realism in his film.
"There is a word I kind of live by: verisimilitude. It means taking every aspect of what you're doing and creating it into one reality. The last thing you want the audience to think about is a camera shooting the movie," says Gorjestani.
"To me, the most important thing is to make a movie and for someone to spend just a few minutes out of their lifetime and just to watch it. If you're an artist you make art for audiences."
To watch Gorjestani's film, go to www.youtube.com and search for The Shade Gorjestani. De Anza's film program is at www.deanza.edu/filmtv.
