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| Foreigner Photo: Saarthak Taneja |
One of the highlights of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, Ava Maria Safai’s Foreigner is the story of Yasamin, an Iranian teenager transplanted to Canada who is desperate to fit in. Seduced by a blizzard of adverts and befriended by a group of girls who are as studiously self-conscious as they are critical of her, she begins to transform herself to suit her new surroundings – but might she, in doing so, be placing herself in danger? It’s a sometimes funny, sometimes creepy piece of work full of smart observations, and I was glad to have the opportunity to talk to Ava about how it came to be.
“I was born in Vancouver,” she tells me. “It's my parents who immigrated here. But I still felt that duality very strongly growing up, because I would go to school and everything would be one way. I'd speak English and I'd have Canadian food and Canadian friends. And then at home, it was like I was being raised Iranian. I was eating Persian food and speaking Farsi and talking to my relatives in Iran, so I was very fully immersed in the culture there. And I always felt this kind of duality where I'm living one life at home and another at school, so that's something that I really wanted to talk about, because I have lots of friends that are maybe mixed race or first generation or immigrated here as teenagers, and I feel like it's a topic that's not as explored. I feel like people focus more on recently arrived immigrants in their late forties, so I wanted to address it from the perspective.”
She just doesn't know anybody except for the new people at school, which must make the stress of trying to fit in a lot worse, I suggest.
She nods. “Yes. And no mom to guide her. She has her grandma, but her grandma is older, and so she doesn't quite relate, I think, to the struggle of teen girls.”
We talk about the girls who take her in to an extent and become her friends, and how they're sort of enemies and friends at the same time. They seem like they're a threat to her, but perhaps not intentionally. And there are all those little undercurrents of racism that they don't quite see in themselves.
“The thing that I've kind of come across with racism in Canada is a lot of people don't even realise that they're doing it,” she says. “It's the little comments of ‘So where are you from?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, I was born here,’ and then they're like, ‘No, no, but where are you actually from?’ That was something that I wanted to address because I don't think people know that they're causing harm.
“Something that I really enjoyed about casting the three girls is they're all very lovely people and they knew this going into the characters, that they didn't want to intentionally cause harm. They were just reacting to the circumstances around them of a new person coming into their lives. That is something that I wanted to do because it almost makes you question who the villain is in the movie. Is it Yasmin herself, because she trying to conform? Is it her family, because they brought her here? Is it these mean girls because they're saying all these racist things? It's just like the whole environment is the villain, I think.”
I tell her that I see a lot of films these days whose directors tell me shyly afterwards ‘Of course, capitalism is the real villain.’ It feels a bit like that in this case, but maybe in a more literal way.
“Yeah, yeah. I hope it felt on the nose. The whole situation is messed up.”
We discuss the dance routines that the girls create.
“Growing up, I was in dance classes and there were all these girls that had been in dance since they were like five, and they were all super close and their pictures were on the wall of the dance studio. I joined when I was 11 or 12. I really wanted to be on the wall, so I wanted to fit in with the girls and learn the routines that they all had, their choreo and stuff that they knew together. And it's like crazy that at 26 now, I still think about that, but I think there's always someone in high school that we remember even later in life, even if we don't want to admit it. So that's kind of where the dance came from. And I used to make music for the videos on my laptop. Me putting on like a wig and dancing to Britney Spears. So that's part of the reason why I wrote it.”
Did the actors feed into that side of it as well, to make it fit their generation?
“Some of the actors are dancers, so they actually choreographed the dance themselves, which was really fun,” she reveals. “We worked on it together. So I had two versions of the song, one with a licensed song and then one with an original. And they made two versions of the dance.”
The script is a delicately balanced lend of comedy and threat, but most of that just flowed naturally, she says.
“I think I wrote the script in a day. The original draft of it just kind of came out as a diary because I was reading the telefilm guidelines and they were wanting movies about the Canadian experience. I just kind of responded to that: ‘Here's my idea of the Canadian experience.’ I wrote down every single experience that I had and then super stylised it and heightened it. So I think the comedy comes from the fact that it's true. I don't even necessarily think you have to be first gen or an immigrant to experience that. Everybody wants to fit in, so maybe that's why it's resonating. We all have people, no matter how cool you are, that you want to be like, and the lengths that you go to fit in with those people is quite hilarious and also very scary.”
Then there’s a big tantrum towards the end where she’s angry at her father and grandmother, and they seem completely taken aback.
“Oh, yeah.” She laughs. “And I had that growing up. My mom is a great mother, and she was always making sure that I was safe. So in grade six, I went on my first date, if you want to call it that, and she followed in her car to make sure that I safe. But I remember my thinking when I realised that my parents were watching over me this way. It was a very reactionary feeling of ‘Hey, I'm an adult now. I can do what I want. You don't need to follow me.’ I think my parents were kind of surprised by that because my whole life I'd grown up, like, going to music class, and everything was very proper. And then you hit your tweens and your teens and you develop your own voice. I think that was surprising for them because I'm also the only child. So I tried to integrate a little bit of truth into the movie.
“And there's no mother figure. I think that's what Jasmine really needs. She needs someone to tell her ‘You don't need to dress like these girls to be cool.’ But it's tricky because the last memory she has of her mom is of this blonde woman that watches American sitcoms in English. So I feel like she sees a bit of her mom in the girls and sees a bit of comfort and security. I think when you're stripped of everything and you lose your home, you look for those things in a new country that make you feel safe.”
The film is full of wonderfull observed bits of advertising and produce design.
“I had written into the script a couple of the names, like Teen Street Magazine,” she says. “I used to read a lot of Teen Vogue and Seventeen, growing up. So took inspiration from that and then, like, Die Blonde. And then I had a great production designer and props master [Hannah Grace Nicholls], and an art director [Jelian Quincina], and they did all the graphics and everything. And then me and my boyfriend were on Canva and creating the magazines and stuff.
“There were little things. The high school horror stories with the lice and stuff. If you look closely and freeze on the frame, you can read that she's seeing other people's experiences with the hair dye. And it's like ‘It was crazy, bugs came out,’ and then that's when they start appearing. And then there's also a lot of details with the jewellery that I didn't come up with. The costume designer did. So they have matching friendship bracelets that are swapped around through the movie. And then the grandma wears a parrot brooch, and she talks about parrots. At the beginning of the movie, Yasmin has a necklace that I've decided is her mom’s. And in the last scene, she doesn't wear it anymore, which was a happy accident. So, yeah, just little things from my childhood that I infused in the script, and then the input of the heads of department.”
There are also some creepy special effects when we’re not sure if she’s hallucinating or not.
“That was really hard. That's like the thing that if I had a million dollars, I would now put a million dollars into the bugs and stuff, because my team was great and they managed to do so much with so little. So we did a prosthetic of little grains of rice on strings that would move around to make them look like bugs. And then we layered all the top of that with some just bubbling movement under the arm, inspired by The Mummy, but in the script, it's described like even more crazy. Like there's a part where some bugs form into a face within her face. But that would have required multiple millions of dollars and more studios, so I'm really proud of the four person team that put that together in a month.
“I think the important thing to get across was just her scratching at her own skin. It's the self harm talked about, and how changing herself has become a destructive thing. I haven't even decided yet if it's a hallucination or if it's a real thing, but there's bits where she's pulling down her sleeves and hiding the cuts. I think that part is real.”
The film was made as part of a project with production budgets capped at $500,000, she says.
“We were under that by a lot. But yeah, I'm used to shooting pretty scrappy and indie. Part of my pitch when I applied for the program was ‘I can do this. I'll make you the movie no matter what.’ And so it just took a lot of craftiness and adjustments. Sometimes I'd really want something but I just had to be realistic and be like, ‘I can't. I have to decide where the money goes.’
“My producing team was very helpful with that, saying ‘okay, you want a big climax scene? Let's put money towards the end of the movie. And then if there's a scene where she's just scratching a couple bugs, we don't have to spend six hours shooting that. We can do an hour.’ So the first AD [Caylee Watrin], the producers and me worked together to figure out where we should allot time and money to.”
After all that, getting to Fantasia felt like a dream, she says.
“My exec producer Nic [Altobelli], early on in the process, was like, ‘Where do you see this movie? Where do you want it to go?’ We listed a couple festivals, but at the top was Fantasia. We felt it would fit really well there. They do elevated genre. So when I got the email from Carolyn [Mauricette], it was very, very exciting. She was also part of the development. Early on she had seen the script when we had just secured funding, so it was really nice to go full circle with someone that knew the story and believed in it. Now I'm just really excited to go see it in Montreal, and maybe other films.”
Does she see herrself as a genre filmmaker? Is that what she expects to be doing in future?
“I love genre because it's an easy way for me to make points about things that I think are important. I like metaphor, and I love working with teens as well. I love the teen drama genre. I grew up on Pretty Little Liars and Gossip Girls, so that's also part of it. But yeah, I really like genre. I think it's my favorite. That doesn't mean I wouldn't do anything else, but it's something that I really enjoy because of how much storytelling and advocacy you can do.”
Before we finish, she takes a moment to thank her team.
“I couldn't have done the movie alone on that budget. There's just no way. And it was a lot of input and a lot of work and donated hours from a lot of people to make it possible. Lots of friends, family, sponsors, funders, even people that weren't necessarily part of the movie, but at some point in my journey got me here – I think that's important. I couldn't have made the movie without them.”
