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Riz Ahmed

Riz Ahmed

THIS is one artist who definitely wears his heart on his sleeve and is proud of doing so.

His short film, The Long Goodbye was in Oscar contention at the time of going to press.


Despite dropping on Youtube in April 2020 and being sponsored by file sharing site, We Transfer, on its artist creative platform, WePresent, the explosive and powerful 11-minute film made it through the early rounds of Academy voting to the final six in the live action short category.

In the autumn last year, its screening at pretigious short film festivals in the United States tied to the Academy and awards therein meant it qualified.

Conceived with fast upcoming British director Aneil Karia, the duo said they made the 11-minute film from the heart and egged each other on to make it as hard-hitting as they could. “It came from a natural place,” Karia said. The creative pair admitted this in December 2021 at an exclusive and intimate London hotel screening, which Eastern Eye (this publication’s sister title) attended.

Mark Kermode, BBC film critic and possibly the most famous film reviewer in the UK today, is a fan of the film and he conducted a short Q & A with the pair post the screening at the W Hotel.

The film depicts a dystopian nightmare scenario and the change in tone is abrupt as it is brilliant. One moment it’s a familiar Asian family scene – cousins bickering, unhappy mom and pop, laughter and gaiety among the young women who have gathered ahead of a family wedding, and Ahmed’s character trying to entertain his young cousin, shift things around the house, and be as helpful as he can…when masked men enter his street and begin to round up Asian men from their homes – he gets bundled out himself. The police are mere bystanders.

What happens next perhaps might spoil your enjoyment (if you can call it that) but is brutal and shocking and ends with a powerful soliloquy delivered by Ahmed.

If that alone wasn’t enough – Ahmed also released details of a new scheme he helped to create and fund – to get more Muslims into Hollywood. Called the Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion it will help Muslims in the early stage of their careers.

Ahmed said it was necessary because a study by the Annenberg Initiative in the US – Missing & Maligned: The Reality of Muslims in Popular Global Movies – found that less than 10 per cent of top grossing films from 2017-2019 from the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand featured at least one Muslim character – when almost a quarter of the world is of that faith.

Even when these film featured Muslim characters, they were depicted as violent, threatening or subservient – at least a third of them were shown like this, while more than half were also targets of violence. There was a lack of happy or just ordinary folks trying to lead what most of us might recognise as an ordinary life.

The Pillars Artist Fellowship will give $25,000 toward Muslim Storytellers – the first annual scheme closed in 2021 and the first recipients were set to be announced early in 2022.

Pillars is an American professional community organisation dedicated to furthering Muslim representation in the US and the artist fellowship fund has an impressive array of judges to view submissions – among them Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, US comedian and Netflix sensation Hasan Minhaj, British TV writer and creative Nida Manzoor (We are Lady Parts – the name of the band featured in the Channel 4 comedy drama) and British comedian Bisha K Ali.

Ahmed said: “Having a source of unrestricted funding for Muslim artists and storytellers will be game-changing.

“Muslim communities in the US and UK are among the most economically disadvantaged, and yet currently there’s nothing else out there like the Pillars Artist Fellowship, which really invests and believes in the talent pipeline.

“Had I not received a scholarship and also a private donation, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity that led me to where I am today.”

It’s been a pretty remarkable journey for Rizwan Ahmed born in Wembley – there was a scholarship to the public school, Merchant’s Taylors’ School and then onto Oxford University to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE).

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 in 2020, 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 first-time 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.

In an article published in Esquire in February 2021, 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 and how increasingly he is exerting control over his own career and choices.

In addition to the feature film, Sound of Metal, there is his own co-scripted feature, Mogul Mowgli.

He also 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 at the same time dropped The Long Goodbye short film – which had been shot in just two days in December 2019.

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 center-forward; NHS food with a reference to daal; miscegenation; and migration.

Conceptualised as a ‘break-up’ album, it’s Ahmed feeling like he is no longer wanted at home in Britain.

Ahmed told Esquire that he still understood Britain as his home – but a question might be, for how long will he continue to regard these craggy shores as that place that he calls home?

He got married at the end of December 2020 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 dad 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’s last year, talked about his family roots in India, in Uttar Pradesh (UP).

In the Grounded with Louis Theroux podcast Ahmed suggests his grandfather’s displacement (from India) to his own (from Britain) are linked and his film, Mogul Mowgli released by the BFI in 2020 and available online and co-written with US-based Bassam Tariq, are linked.

The creative pair explore the intergenerational trauma of Partition through the lead character’s father – Bashir, played by a brilliant Alyy Khan.

“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 Ahmed added: “My country’s broken up with me. We had our ups but now it’s broken down.” This sense of displacement is then, both real and creative, political and personal.

He performed The Long Goodbye at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall – an iconic venue without an audience and only technicians, under Covid restrictions in February 2021.

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 2021.

“I always had a show to hide behind, but this is showing me,” he told Rolling Stone magazine 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 but the evening promise give way to nightmare when he finds the woman dead in bed and he taken into custody as suspect number one.

Mogul Mowgli premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2020 and was well-reviewed, winning an international critics award.

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, but has to return from the US to London and the parental home because of an autoimmune illness.

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 that the film was “really exciting and interesting” and “impressive” and urged people to see it in cinemas.

Those journalists who first heard Ahmed talk about Mogul Mowgli 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 last year and is now also up for three Oscars in 2022 – best animation, international feature (it is multi-lingual) and best documentary feature.

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 in 2020, which ended up being cancelled because of the global pandemic. He will play the lead character in an English language version of the multilingual original.

His Left Handed Films, based in the UK came into to help with Flee.

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 things have gone quiet on his proposed BBC Asian family saga, Englistan.

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