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| Tatami |
Tatami, co-directed by Israeli filmmaker Guy Nattiv and Iranian actress and director Zar Amir Ebrahimi, centres on Leila (Arienne Mandi), an Iranian judo athlete who arrives to compete at the Judo World Championships. As the tournament unfolds, the Iranian Judo Federation are eager to avoid a potential contest with Leila's Israeli rival in the final, and so they instruct her to fake an injury and to pull out of the championships.
Leila refuses and as the pressure mounts, the Iranian team coach, Maryam (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), implores her fighter to see reason. Despite the intimidation of her teammates and the Iranian Federation, who threaten her parents, husband and young child back home in Iran, Leila is steadfast in her refusal to compromise both her integrity and her dream of a medal.
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Nattiv's previous films include the 2019 Academy Award-winning live action short film Skin, about a polite gesture that ignites racially motivated violence between two gangs. He turned this into the feature film of the same name, which told the story of a man seeking redemption through those he had been taught to hate. In 2017, he co-directed (with Eraz Tadmor) the dramatic love story Strangers, which revolves around a chance meeting between an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman during the World Cup in Germany, whose relationship is complicated by the Israel-Lebanon war. Nattiv also directed the coming-of-age drama The Flood (Mabul), and the 2023 political drama, Golda, about former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's leadership during the Yom Kippur War.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Nattiv discussed making an underground movie and the real threats posed by the Iranian regime. He also spoke about channeling his anger through art, his frustrations with the calls for boycotting artists and using the film's black and white cinematography to empathise with the plight of Iranian women.
The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Paul Risker: I first saw Tatami when it played the Venice Film Festival in 2023, and it's only now having its US theatrical release. So, there's some introductory stuff to unpack, and maybe the starting point is the real life events behind the film.
Guy Nattiv: It all started with a real incident that happened at the 2019 Tokyo Judo World Championships. The Iranian judo fighter [Saeid Mollaei] and the Israeli judo fighter [Sagi Muki] were best friends behind the scenes, but their governments obviously were not. Saeid started winning and winning, and every match you win, you go on to the next stage. So, he was getting close to competing for a medal, and the Iranian authorities saw that the Israeli was too.
Saeid received phone calls from the Iranian Judo Federation to abort the mission, to injure himself, blah, blah, blah. He was like, fuck that, I'm going for the gold. I don't care who I'm fighting against — that's not the point. This is my moment. I'm twentysomething, and I'm at the peak of my career and I can take the gold medal. And in response, they told him that every fight he was gonna go for, he was going to pay the price back in Iran. And that's where everything shifted when the International Judo Federation started to get involved. The behind-the-scenes was as dramatic as the drama on the mats.
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PR: How did you land on the idea to use this real-life incident as inspiration for Tatami, and how did Zar Amir Ebrahimi come to collaborate on the project?
GN: In 2020, during the pandemic, I said to myself, 'Okay, this is something I want to write.' When you work on scripts, it can sometimes take you years to really crack the script, but I wrote this in one month. It was like, boom, I just got it. But because I'm neither Iranian nor Persian, I wanted to open myself up to Iranian female talent. And at that specific time, the Mahsa Amini murder happened, and that sparked a whole generation of Iranian female athletes to rebel against the regime. We remember [Elnaz Rekabi] the mountain climber that competed without her hijab, and she got into trouble. Kimia Alizadeh, the taekwondo bronze medalist who represented Iran, said enough is enough and wanted to move to France. And they told her that she was going to pay the price. So, it was kind of a movement.
At the same time, I watched Holy Spider by Ali Abbasi and my mind was blown away. My jaw dropped, and I first thought I would love to have Zar play the coach, and then when I spoke with her, I asked what she thought about collaborating and co-directing the film? I said, "You'll cast the movie as well, and I want you involved in the script." I also had Elham Erfani as a co-screenwriter.
Anyway, I opened myself up to collaboration and that upgraded everything. It just made everything super-authentic, and they made changes to the script. We changed it from male to female and very quickly we found ourselves as Americans, Israelis, Iranians and Georgians in Tbilisi, Georgia, two hours away from Tel Aviv and two hours away from Iran, making a movie underground. Crew members were scattered in different hotels speaking only English, because the Iranian government are after Zar, after what happened to her — you know the famous story.
I'd received notification from the American Embassy to say, watch out. The Mossad had just caught an Iranian squad trying to kill an Israeli businessman. And Zar got a phone call from the French embassy saying to her, watch out, there's a lot of Iranians in Tbilisi — you gotta be really careful.
We really shot the film under the radar, and we called it by a different name, but it was a love fest. We found each other and we found out that we're like brothers and sisters. We love the same food; we love the same cinema, and we grew up on the same TV shows. It's our governments that keep telling us that we are enemies when we're not.
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So, it was an organic process of shooting this movie and the cool thing is that we bought the stadium for a month. It was our playground basically. It was a Russian stadium from the Fifties because Georgia was occupied. But it added to the claustrophobia and the paranoia of the films that we grew up on, that we tried to make an homage to like Three Days Of The Condor, The Conversation, Marathon Man, All The President's Men, The Parallax View, Blowout, Day Of The Jackal, Rosemary's Baby, The French Connection, The Boys From Brazil, and Serpico. These are the films that I grew up on and my father took me to see — they got under my skin and into my blood. They're political and paranoia-themed movies and you can add the Eighties movie The Falcon And The Snowman, which is one of my favourites.
PR: These are the movies you were talking with Zar about?
GN: I spoke to Zara about them, but she didn't know a lot of them. The way we directed this movie, I was on the monitor with the cinematographer and Zar was with the actors. And I'd direct Zar when she was on camera. We'd switch and meet at the monitor, and we said, "Okay, it's almost like two coaches before a boxing fight."
I will never forget one time we were waiting for the next setup, and Zar asked me, "Can I tell you a story that will freak you out a little?" I told her, "Okay, give it to me." She said, "When I was a kid, every morning when I went to school, before stepping into the class, I had two doormats. One was an Israeli flag, and the other one was an American flag. I had to spit on both and say, "Death to Israel; death to America." That's how I started my day. Now, I never understood why I needed to say that; they never explained to me. But now I'm sitting with you here (the small Satan, not the big Satan), and I feel that you're like my family. And it's crazy that we're doing this film right now." That's where we understood that we were doing something almost historic with this collaboration. We only want to see that more and more, like the documentary No Other Land, a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian.
I was at the Peace Awards in Germany, and I went on stage to say that instead of boycotting each other, we need to use art as our weapon, in order to heal. If you go online all the time ranting and saying bad stuff, then it just creates more misery. I have a lot of Jordanian and Palestinian friends here in LA, and I tell them, "Go make your art. Just make movies. Write something — a song, a poem, a movie, a TV show. That's how you can use art as your weapon."
I always channel my anger into my art. And if it's Skin, the short film or if it's Skin, the feature or if it's my next movie about my grandmother, all of my first frustrations and my demons are channeled in it. And that's why I love Zar and Ali Abbasi and what they did in Holy Spider. It's a form of resistance, but through art, not violence. So, that's my DNA.
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And that's why I love what Oliver Stone did in the Eighties and Nineties after the Vietnam War. He made films that came from his heart and dark soul, and they were so powerful. Even his first film, Salvador, about the journalist [Richard Boyle], was one of those bursts that I adore. So, he's one of my favourite filmmakers, who is political but also entertaining, like Platoon, for example — wow, what a movie.
PR: Barber's Adagio For Strings is synonymous with Platoon, which leads me to consider Martin Scorsese's use of the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana in Raging Bull as well as the main theme of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks' World War II series, Band Of Brothers. All of these pieces of music are emotionally moving and remind us of the importance of music as a tool to stir our humanity.
GN: It's also poetry and I think that's what differentiates them. It's not about being real, it's another level of poetry that Stone, Scorsese, and Spielberg have. And you can also look at The Thin Red Line.
With our small budget, we felt we were free to do whatever the fuck we wanted to. No one told us what to do, what to write, or how to express it. We were really free, and that's why we felt it was our movie at the end of the day.
PR: With Tatami, you get the sense that the suspense isn't being created, it's genuine. What is also striking is the anger it compels inside of you as you watch it and the discomfort at realising how powerless we are to effect change. It's a deeply emotional experience.
GN: While we were shooting, Zar received notifications about the situation for women in Iran. Every day there was another arrest. Someone died in prison or one of those rappers was arrested. The rage was genuine because you're helpless. You see it in the diaspora, and you can do nothing about it. You can post about it, but there's nothing that's going to change the regime. You could feel the actors were using their rage in certain scenes.
Tatami was also a very physical movie. We had real judo fighters from Ukraine, Georgia and France participating in the fights themselves. And Arienne Mandi is amazing. She trained for six months, learning judo from scratch in LA. She's a boxer, and she gave everything she had in order to be this visceral and emotional character, and yet she uses her physicality to overcome those fights.
PR: It feels that Tatami needed to be shot in black and white, but as the film's co-director, does it serve a deeper purpose?
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GN: The black and white came from an idea that these Iranian and Persian women are waking every day in Iran to a black and white reality. They cannot sing in public; they cannot wear dresses with yellow dots and butterflies; they cannot talk to other men; they cannot watch football matches with other men, and they need to cover their heads. And it's always yes or no — there's no middle ground. They are basically second-class citizens or are very isolated. The Iranian regime treats them as black and white. So, there are not many options in their lives. And the frame was kind of square, almost like the tatami itself. This was to give you the feeling that you cannot escape this claustrophobia of the square frame.
I tried to shoot a lot of windows so you could get frames in the frame, so you would feel choked because that's how these women feel. They cannot escape and also shooting black and white provides a canvas that you don't really know what year the movie is set. It could be the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, or it could be 10 years from now. So, the canvas doesn't have a lot of details. Instead, it's more abstract, which I love, and I think it was right for this specific project to shoot in black and white. We had to fight for that, but we won.
PR: On the audio commentary track of Tim Burton's Ed Wood, it was said that by shooting in black and white you literally halve the film's takings. Does it come with such severe risks or potential backlash?
GN: It's not about the cinema as much as I think it's about the TV deals you make afterwards — they're trying not to take the black and white option. They're always sending you to do another, colour version. So, it narrows your TV deals, and I understand that. I think Roma is the only specific project that they went with it. A lot of those projects are very hard to do in black and white, but because ours was such a small-budget film, we weren't as much of a risk, and so, it was easier to do.
PR: The behind-the-scenes story about resistance mirrors the onscreen story, but do you have any other thoughts on art as a means of resistance or the way it's being used now as a political tool or weapon?
GN: Our governments were trying to prevent us from meeting each other and being friends, but we defied that, and we actually made something against the regime. So, we, behind the scenes, crossed the line, by telling a story about governments that are trying to limit people having human relationships.
Now, a lot of people are saying, "Boycott" but I think it's the wrong way to go. Instead of boycotting Russian directors, let them express their anti-Putin narrative. It doesn't make any sense to me that you boycott artists that are anti-government. Tomorrow there's a conflict in Brazil, so you're going to boycott the work of Brazilian filmmakers. It doesn't make sense, but the world is so extreme right now. This film is pro-collaboration and anti-regime, and so, that's the goal of what we do.
Tatami played the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival in February 2025. It opens at the IFC Center In New York City on June 13th and at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles on June 20th.
