For Ramin Bahrani, N.C. native and one of the newest faces in world cinema, the work never stops

Getting to Sundance Film Festival is the classic badge of indie film achievement, but it doesn’t necessarily address the secondary concerns raised by the senior Bahranis. “They wanted to know, ‘How you going to pay your bills?’ And that, of course, is a very legitimate question,” said Bahrani, a tall, bespectacled man who combines austere work habits with loquacious affability.

Just making it to Sundance required years of extraordinary commitment and sacrifice. In late December I visited Bahrani in Winston-Salem, where he was spending the holidays with his family. Our initial late-night interview was a study in contrasts between the myth of movie glamour and the realities of the indie film business.

On one hand, Bahrani had recently completed an autumn tour of top European and African festivals, including Venice, Thessaloniki (where his lead actor Ahmad Razvi copped the acting award), Mannheim, London and Marrakech (where he met with Martin Scorsese and served as English translator for one of his idols, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami).

On the other hand, the bright lights of foreign film festivals seemed far, far away as we spoke in the parking lot of a deserted strip mall, having been chased away from a Borders bookstore at closing time by a surly, hose-wielding janitor. Bahrani confessed that as much as he was visiting his folks, he was also, practically speaking, living with them for a couple of weeks. A decade of dedication to his cinematic obsessions had yet to yield a reliable living, and this globetrotting filmmaker had been officially homeless since July.

Although his film had done well abroad, the upcoming Sundance festival would be the film’s first appearance before the all-important audience of North American filmgoers and distributors. The festival would help determine the fate of Bahrani’s film and it held the potential to affect Bahrani’s life. It was three weeks away.

Me, you and everybody we know

For young filmmakers with short résumés like Ramin Bahrani, Sundance presents an opportunity to show one’s wares before 50,000 movie fans, 3,000 members of the press, and every distributor of low budget films in the country. Members of the media get first peeks at next year’s crop of movies, and the more influential of uslike Roger Ebert, the New York Times‘ A.O. Scott or the trendspotters of the Village Voicecan champion an upstart film and make all the difference in the world.

Earlier in the day, Bahrani had called me with the news that the British film journal Screen International had named him one of the world’s most exciting young directors. Later, when he sat down with me in an alcove of the Park City Marriott, he had some good news about Man Push Cart: “I just sold the theatrical rights to Benelux.” Coming into the festival, Bahrani had sold theatrical rights in France and Greece, and his sales agent in Europe was working one country after another. After a pause, Bahrani admitted that he’d just learned that the pharmaceutical-sounding Benelux was shorthand for Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Although he still lacks an American buyer for Man Push Cart, Bahrani is beginning to reap the harvest of his cinematic labors. Not only will this upstart filmmaker receive his biggest exposure to U.S. audiences yet, but a couple of other projects are beginning to bear financial fruit. He was recently awarded funding from Independent Television Service (ITVS) to create a drama set in the rough and tumble world of Winston-Salem’s Senegalese taxi drivers, and he’s expecting a check soon. “It’s the first time that I’ve ever been paid to do this, after 10 years,” he said. He has received grants and fellowships, however, including a two-month stint at the Headlands writers’ retreat north of San Francisco, courtesy of the North Carolina Arts Council. There he worked on the script for Man Push Cart.

Spending time with Bahrani is an object lesson in the extraordinary amount of focused energy that is required to succeed in the world of independent film and at a festival like Sundance. “I don’t see how you can survive if you don’t have a clear vision,” he said. This is partly why he only intermittently keeps up with what other indie filmmakers his age and background are doing, preferring to watch the work of classic directors like Robert Flaherty, John Cassavetes and Italian neo-realists like De Sica, Visconti and Rossellini. There are also unmistakeable traces of Iranian filmmaking techniques like those of Abbas Kiarostami.

In a way, Man Push Cart seems out of place at this festival, which is filled with works that hew to a style of filmmaking that is notoriously associated with Sundancea naturalistic focus on working-class characters in rustic locations looking to overcome obstacles presented by their race, class or sexual orientation. Bahrani’s film eschews this style, however, being shot at a greater emotional and aesthetic distance and shunning the easy routes to its audience’s heartstrings. It is a deliberate, studied and very moving film about immigrant lonelinessmade all the more compelling because of its lack of melodramatic contrivance.

But will it play in Park City?

Going into Sundance, Bahrani was concerned about the film’s placement in the festival. Man Push Cart wasn’t scheduled to premiere until Thursday, the seventh day of the 10-day fest, and the press screening wouldn’t happen until Friday morning, by which time many influential tastemakers would have already left town, either to return home or to push on toward Rotterdam and Berlin, the next two stops on the festival circuit.

Man Push Cart fought for attention amid 120 films in venues all around town. With so many movies in search of audiences, one couldn’t walk two feet in Park City without encountering posters exhorting festival-goers to see this or that exciting new film. However, there were no such posters for Man Push Cart because Bahrani had to do the festival on the cheap. His film had already played festivals abroad, and the independent distributors were aware of his work, so he decided to not spend money he didn’t have on a publicist. Instead, Bahrani acted as his own flack.

Opening night

The big day arrived for Bahrani and his crew. I met Bahrani, lead actor Ahmad Razvi, cinematographer Michael Simmonds and several others at the Prospector Square Theater, and together we waited in the green room. Bahrani was full of energy: He sat down, he stood up, he checked his messages, he raced in and out of the room. Later, however, Bahrani said that whatever anxiety he felt here was nothing compared to his Venice premiere, where he grimly took a position in the back of the theater in order to count the number of walkouts. (There were 10 early exits out of that crowd of a thousand, which is as good as none in the hurly-burly of an important film festival.)

Simmonds, who has the personality of the hearty surf dude he is, tried to read a newspaper. This was his first Sundance film, and I asked if he was nervous. “No, but I wish I was more intoxicated,” he replied before dashing to the bathroom.

It was 5:15 p.m. Fifteen minutes to go.

The most relaxed person in the room seemed to be Vinay Jayaram, one of Bahrani’s producers. After graduating from Duke University in 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in German literature, Jayaram went to work for a New York investment bank where he met Bahrani through a co-worker. “Ramin is always driven by intellectual curiosity. He’s driven to learn about new facets of life that he didn’t know about,” Jayaram said.

At 5:30 p.m., the theater, which holds 350 people, was gratifyingly full, despite Bahrani’s lack of PR resources. After a generous introduction by festival director Gilmore, Bahrani took the stage. “I don’t want to say too much at this point,” he began, “but there are three small things I’d like to mention.” Bahrani first mentioned what he called “George Bush’s bombing” of Afghanistan, an event that, in fact, got him thinking about Afghans and Pakistanis living in New York. He then cited two literary works, Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” where Sisyphus is recast as an absurdist hero, pushing the rock up the hill over and over as a justification for his existence. Bahrani also invoked the world’s best-selling poet, the 13th-century Persian Sufi writer Rumi.

Finally, it was time for Man Push Cart. Filmed in the literal and figurative shadows of New York in high definition video, the movie is a grave, documentary-influenced look at the daily struggle for survival in the ultimate city of immigrants. The opening scenes are devoted to the quotidian details of operating one of those ubiquitous stands. The day begins at 2 a.m. as we see Ahmad (Razvi) arrive at the warehouse, fill his propane tank and load up on doughnuts and coffee. Then comes the long, pre-dawn toil of pushing (or, mostly, pulling) the cart down Manhattan’s hilly avenues to assume a position in time for the morning commutersa sequence that is hauntingly photographed with long lenses by Simmonds.

While Bahrani conveys a feeling of urban loneliness similar to what Scorsese produced in Taxi Driver, it’s the sort of thing that only a filmmaker with the perspective of a foreigner would get right. Man Push Cart isn’t a film that grabs audiences by the lapels like a Scorsese filmor recent Sundance hits like Hustle and Flow or Napoleon Dynamite. Instead, it’s a reflective, carefully observed film with off-kilter editing choices that reinforce the outsider’s point of view. Man Push Cart ends up being far more reminiscent of Middle Eastern cinemaand decades-old Western influencesthan any other film recently produced in America.

The crowd sat raptly through the film as Ahmad encounters difficulties with employers and the family of his deceased wife. But rather than being extensively plotted, the film contains vignettes of Ahmad adopting a stray kitten, selling bootlegged DVDs and entering into a tenuous, confused relationship with another immigrant, a Spanish newsstand vendor.

It’s a delicately daring film, and when the lights came up, it was clear that the audience had remained with it. The applause was loud and appreciative as Bahrani and his entourage took the stage, and most people stayed for the Q&Aalways a good sign. One woman, a New Yorker, commented that she’d never seen the city assume such a scary role, almost as a character in its own right. On the subject of Rumi’s influence, Bahrani cited the verse which led him to his film’s title.

I am the polo stick, you are the ball.

Whereever I hit you, you must go,

Wherever you go, I must follow.

Later that night, I attended a post-premiere celebration at the condo being shared by the Man Push Cart gang, located on a steep hill at the top of Main Street. I got there at midnight as it started to snow. Things were hopping inside where an assortment of friends, hip-hop entrepreneurs and fellow filmmakers struggled toward intoxication on Utah’s notorious low-alcohol beer.

Bahrani showed me pictures from his scouting trips for his next two projects, both of which will also explore outsider cultures: Untitled Senegalese Taxi Driver Film, to be shot in Winston Salem,and Chop Shop, a tale of auto salvage yard workers in the shadow of Shea Stadium in Queens.