Echoes of Zahedi

Something unexpected happened at the New/Next Film Festival last weekend: I found myself thinking a lot about Caveh Zahedi. It’s not because that he was there with a film (although he did make a cameo in the fest’s secret screening), but because Zahedi’s intense, uncomfortable honesty in his rigorous and controversial filming ethics from decades ago seems more ahead of its time as years have moved on. There’s been a rejuvenated popularity in exploring the confines—and extrapolating from them— of the less-than-savory realities of documentary process and those who control the gaze of the camera. This is exemplified through Nathan Fielder's turn from playing with business-friendly reality TV in Nathan For You (2013-17), to more directly postmodern exercise in exploring the painful tensions between reality and fiction in The Rehearsal (2022) and The Curse (2024). The work feels like a continuation of a conversation on documentary form’s relationship to its contents that Zahedi stabbed into with his camera. This was what was rattling around in my head for at least the first half of The Code (2024), which played less like a progression of that conversation, and more like a playful attempt at recreating it.

During the early days of Covid, a woman starts making a documentary about love-in-lockdown while also trying to rejuvenate her sexless relationship with her boyfriend. In provocative retaliation, he starts secretly filming her as well, creating a game of documentary ethics and questions about the reality of the form. There’s a charm to the house-of-cameras, and director Eugene Kotlyarenko is snappy in compositing his multi-camera work. But the fictiveness of the circumstance leaves little genuine tension—narrative, formal, sexual, what have you—on screen. Instead, the disingenuity of the exercise becomes unintentionally highlighted, with the leads Peter Vack and Dasha Nekrasova coming off less like people trapping themselves in their own desires for surveillance, than those doing a bit on a long-form TikTok video. There’s an untenable divide in the attempted authenticity of the form when the content itself is completely artificial, and refuses to dig into the artifice of what the film itself is doing, rather than just what the characters on screen are doing. It’s hard to make a house-of-cameras movie that’s going to do only the most basic questioning of its methods in the years immediately after The Rehearsal or The Zone of Interest (2023), but the conclusions The Code lands on in the editing room feel like if instead of Joe Swanberg ambivalently tripping into the loop of making films-within-films that not-so-quietly tried to rip apart his own work and ethics through his Full Moon Trilogy (most importantly here, The Zone [2011]), the film itself ends with cutesy celebration. Again, I was thinking about Caveh Zahedi—but maybe it’s unfair to read a movie by wishing it had rougher edges.

Half an hour after getting out of The Code, the producer for Bronze Dog (2024) was joking that “this film is gonna kill Caveh ZahedI.” And Michael Bernieri’s “autofiction against autofiction” film was a breath of fresh air, at least through its authenticity. Bronze Dog is a short where a guy tries to reconcile his breakup by turning it into a documentary about the breakup, the short itself a way for the director to work through his own breakup. Talking about it just formally, though, would be a disservice to how funny the movie is, in particular held together by Eric Rahill’s convincing misguidedness as the director. Rahill also co-stars in the feature Bronze Dog was attached to—the highly anticipated Rap World (2024)—alongside Jack Bensinger and Conner O’Malley.

Co-directed by O’Malley and his regular collaborator Danny Scharar, Rap World documents three friends in Tobyhanna, PA in 2009 as they spend a night failing to record a rap album. Their overconfidence and egos always get the better of them, and through a melee of grainy digital footage and Coldplay hits coming over the radio, we follow the guys in their continuous attempts to distract themselves from what they say they’re supposed to be doing. During the Q&A when asked about the development process for the characters, O’Malley joked that all the guys who made the film are really two or three decisions away from becoming the ones onscreen.

This sort of self-reflexivity is key to the humor in O’Malley and co.’s work in Rap World and beyond—they really know these guys. It goes beyond playing it out just to make fun of a type of person, it adds an enduring quality, one that’s reflected in the process of the film: it was also talked about at the Q&A how part of that collaborative process was just documenting their friends from the comedy scene before people started inevitably migrating from New York to LA. What I’m saying here is probably as revealing of my taste and what I value in cinema rather than the quality of the films themselves, but that authenticity feels vital, important. It’s the reason we make and watch movies in the first place.