FOR many, 2020 has been the strangest and most difficult year to comprehend.
For Riz Ahmed, it has been one of growth and self-understanding, by all accounts.
He became the first British Asian and also the first Muslim to receive an Oscar nomination for best actor for his role in the feature film, Sound of Metal.
A US indie film that got a cinema release last year, Ahmed plays a heavy metal drummer, Ruben, who begins to lose his hearing – and the film is about the central character trying to adjust to his new deaf world.
Brilliantly soundscaped and directed by firsttime narrative feature director Darius Marder, Ahmed has described the time in which he made Sound of Metal in 2018, as “life-changing” and the film has been critically acclaimed widely. Ahmed carries the whole film on his shoulders and it is a performance of power and passion – he not only learnt to drum but sign as well – as Ruben joins a deaf community and has to sign to communicate.
He was nominated for a Golden Globe in 2021, for his role, but lost out to Chadwick Boseman in the film adaptation, of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a play by the celebrated writer and chronicler of the near contemporary African-American experience, August Wilson.
In an article published in Esquire this February, Ahmed told fellow Brit Sanjiv Bhattacharaya: “I feel really positive about where I’m at creatively. I’m working from a much more personal place, and I feel like I am finding my voice, my language. I’m doing what I want to do now, rather than what someone else wants.”
That last sentence is crucial in appreciating what Ahmed has achieved over the year and what he might go onto do. It feels like 2020 was the start of a new phase in his life and dare we say it – it may prove to be pivotal in both a personal and professional sense.
Few artists have done anything on this scale and especially during a lockdown. He started this period, seemingly at the parental home in Wembley and doing Youtube and Zooms with friends such as writers Fatima Bhutto, Rupi Kaur and Nikesh Shukla (as a group).
Uncertain of what might follow during the first lockdown, he got creative and filled his Youtube channel – with little idea of what might follow.
It’s been an amazing year for the 38-year-old with two major feature films releasing in 2020, an album, an impactful short film and his own production company gathering momentum.
He also has some Hollywood parts and left Britain in the Autumn to film.
In addition to the feature film, Sound of Metal, there is his own co-scripted feature, Mogul Mowgli. He released a music album at the start of the pandemic – called The Long Goodbye – and then turned that into a musical stage show with the same title, and also broadcast a new accompanying short film, also entitled The Long Goodbye and dropped this on his own Youtube channel.
He says his music is where you will find the true Riz, if we can put it like that.
He is an old school rapper, mixing the dialect and cadences of street speech with complex and difficult ideas, sometimes inspired by the great Urdu writers, Muhammad Iqbal and Saadat Hasan Manto.
“Rhyme for no reason Rave Revelation Good book and garage both Gabriel saved ‘em…”
This is from the opening lines of Once Kings, one of the tracks on The Long Goodbye album.
The same track explores Partition; Mo Salah, the Liverpool centre-forward; NHS food with a reference to daal; miscegenation; and migration. The 11-minute accompanying film is a difficult watch (at the very end) but is compelling and quietly brilliant in its explosive realisation.
It starts with a very relatable south Asian family setting – there is a wedding in the offing, several generations are in the one house and there is joy and excitement.
However, the mood rapidly changes when the family realise an attack is being mounted and the neighbours, and more shockingly, the police step back either in acquiescence or fear, or elements of both.
It won the Best Short Film Award at this year’s British Independent Film Awards.
This is artistry that stands on its own, has something to say and often speaks to people – beyond boundaries, cultures and ethnicities.
Ahmed not only stars in The Long Goodbye short film, but wrote and produced it. It is directed by up and coming auteur Aneil Karia and it depicts a nightmare scenario and is in some ways the very logical and unflinching conclusion for themes covered in all these creative works, but most personally in his own music output. Conceptualised as a ‘break-up’ album, it’s Ahmed feeling like he is no longer wanted at home in Britain.
He told Esquire that he still understood Britain (he is Wembley raised) as home – but a question might be, for how long will he continue to regard these craggy shores as that place he calls home?
He got married at the end of December to American novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza, whose first novel, A Place for Us (2018) is a New York Times bestseller.
It is reported that her parents are of Indian origin – her mother grew up in Birmingham, while her father is from Hyderabad in India.
Ahmed met Mirza fortuitously in a New York coffee shop, jostling over a laptop plug point.
He confessed to US chat show host Jimmy Fallon, it was “like a very modern way of meeting”.
Later, the star in a very personal and revelatory podcast with celebrity BBC interviewer Louis Theroux this year, talked about his family roots in India, in Uttar Pradesh (UP).
His grandfather first left UP for Calcutta (as it was then), before moving to Pakistan on its creation in 1947.
Ahmed is often described as British Pakistani and while that is a simple and accurate label (as much as they are), it also sometimes serves to obscure his very rich and complex heritage – he often raps about a shared or (indivisible, pre-Partition) history.
In The Long Goodbye album, he raps: ‘My people built the West – we even gave the skinheads swastikas.’
Anyone who has been to India might be slightly disconcerted by the sight of swastikas daubed on temples and walls – though the Hindu swastika, an ancient good luck symbol, is always on its side, never upright. The Nazis also reversed it and Hitler appropriated it, believing mistakenly that Aryan (white) culture began in India and lighter-skinned brown people migrated westwards.
In the Grounded with Louis Theroux, Ahmed suggests his grandfather’s displacement (from India) to his own (from Britain) are linked and his film, Mogul Mowgli released by the BFI last summer and available online and co-written with US-based Bassam Tariq, are linked.
The creative pair explore the inter-generational trauma of Partition through the lead character’s father – Bashir, played by a brilliant Alyy Khan.
It is important to try to understand The Long Goodbye (and how his creative year started) in all its manifestations over this year – and we can only do that by centering the notion of displacement –and its effects: alienation, disengagement, anger, frustration, sadness, bitterness, relief.
“So many of us feel like we are being dumped by the place we call home, a home that we built. This album takes you on a journey of this break-up; through the stages of denial, anger, acceptance and finally self-love to counter the hate.”
And he added: “My country’s broken up with We had our ups but now it’s broken down.”
This sense of displacement is then, both real and creative, political and personal.
Iconic US music magazine Rolling Stone described the musical stage performance of The Long Goodbye as ‘part confessional, part political protest, part hip-hop concert’.
Ahmed recently performed The Long Goodbye at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall – an iconic venue without an audience and only technicians, under Covid-19 restrictions this February.
The result was available on the web through Manchester International Festival, which along with Brooklyn Academy of Music, commissioned the stage version and also made it available On Demand, for a minimum of £5, during the month of February this year.
“I always had a show to hide behind, but this is showing me,” he told Rolling Stone about the show and the music.
This has become something of a theme – the actor and his masks.
Actors wear many and for so long, Ahmed says he has been doing a job, performing a role, playing parts.
“Now this is me” – he can do that unencumbered when making his own content – whether it be his film (as in Mogul Mowgli), or through his music.
He had met Mogul Mowgli co-writer Tariq when he was filming for The Night of (2016) – for which he won his Emmy. It is the story of a young American Pakistani New Yorker who picks up an attractive white girl in his ‘borrowed’ dad’s taxi cab. They party – but the girl ends up being murdered and he becomes the prime suspect.
Tariq had made an acclaimed documentary, These Birds Walk (2014) about the Pakistanbased humanitarian Gujarati-born Abdul Sattar Edhi (1928-2016) and the two filmmakers were kindred spirits – raised in the West but with Pakistani Muslim heritage.
Mogul Mowgli premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2020 and was well reviewed, winning an international critics award there. Ahmed said the production was an “unapologetically brown film, unapologetically bold in its creative vision”.
The story focuses on rapper Zed, played by Ahmed himself, who on the verge of a massive international breakthrough touring spot, has to return from the US to London and the parental home because of an auto-immune illness.
Ahmed told Esquire he has a condition but did not specify what it is, and his album also alludes to treatment, drugs and hospitals.
A segment of Mogul Mowgli is set in a hospital and shows the pressures this emerging star is under.
A rival rapper (Nabhaan Rizwan) who goes by the stage name RPG, threatens to fill the vacuum; his own business manager Vaseem, (played by Anjana Vasan, an Eastern Eye Arts, Culture and Theatre awards winner this year), helps to pave a deal and there is further tension with his American girlfriend, Bina (Aiysha Hart).
Amid all this, Zed’s mother (Sudha Bhuchar) and father (Khan), while welcoming their son home, are still not totally comfortable about his career choice.
They also have their own issues and dad Bashir is still traumatised by Partition and escaping on a train.
Those familiar with the Manto story, Toba Tek Singh will recognise the same demons here in the film – once friends and neighbours have become enemies, who will think nothing of taking a sword to people they once understood as their own.
BBC film critic Mark Kermode said Ahmed had described the film to him as “as a Sufi horror musical with elements of comedy about family ties and an intergenerational divide”.
Kermode said the film was “really exciting and interesting” and “impressive” and urged people to see it in cinemas.
The film has yet to be released in North America and the BFI purchased the UK and Ireland rights – it is available in the UK on the BFI player. Those journalists who first heard Ahmed talk about it in Berlin can vouch for his depth and intelligence – and the film is both a deeply personal and powerful meditation on many things that are present in Ahmed’s own mind. All this creative output has allowed this star to move up the food chain of filmmaking itself.
He backed Flee – an animated feature which premiered to great acclaim at the virtual Sundance Film Festival this year.
It tells the incredible story of an Afghan refugee who flees his war-torn home as a kid, relocates to the West but can never reveal the true extent of his torment or his story as a gay man finding love and establishing a successful career in the West.
Ahmed executively produced Flee and came aboard after it was meant to premiere in Cannes last year. He will play the lead character in an English language version of the multilingual original.
His Left Handed Films, based in the UK, has just made its first hire. Allie Moore, a well-known American producer will oversee production and development for Ahmed.
The company has several projects on its slate, including Exit West, a screen adaptation of Moshin Hamid’s novel, which is also being backed by the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions. President Barack cited it as one of his favourite books in 2017.
Ahmed is also reportedly making Hamlet for Netflix, playing the most famous prince of Denmark himself, and while little has been heard recently about his Englistan for the BBC, there have been rumours that writers from Small Axe, the BBC’s award-winning series on black Britain life in the 1970s and 1980s, directed by Oscar winner Sir Steve McQueen and screened in November last year, are helping Ahmed bring his tale of a British Pakistani family in the 1970s and 1980s to screen life.
