Every few years, you get a film submitted that you want to bring to the attention of the world in a way more than just screening it. In the case of Anwar, it's more than just that. One of the most thoughtful science fiction films I've ever had the pleasure of programming, it's a story that is intensely beautiful and unbelievably thoughtful. You can read my review on Nerds of a Feather
Director Fawaz al-Matrouk was kind enough to answer a few of my questions!

1) What was the origin story for Anwar?  

There are a few ways I can answer this. Anwar came together over years of thinking through a story and a theme. The first version of it was out by the water in San Francisco. I like to sit by the water and write sometimes. I set myself the task of working through painful moments in my life, and looking at them from a science fiction lens. I grew up in a religious family, and there was a moment where I expressed doubts as a teenager, and I expected my mother to disown me. But what I saw was not anger, it was love, and a deep sadness that she might live forever in Heaven, and I would not be with her. Working through those memories, I began to imagine the reverse situation, where forever was possible on Earth. I had recently read Tim Urban’s piece on Neuralink, and was thinking through our possible future, the relationship between computers and the brain, and what does that say about the mind? The soul? What does that do to our belief systems? To our faith? So the story started there, and developed around the idea of the last biological human, who had the option to live forever on Earth, but believed in Heaven and wanted to die a human death.

The film came together because of my friend Jared Seehafer. He comes from the tech world, but knows more about films than even I do, and we had long and meaningful conversations about stories and production. He wanted to do a short together. I shared with him a list of concepts, and he pointed immediately to Anwar and said: this, this is a Fawaz picture. At that point, there was the sketch for a feature I wrote at SFFILM, and the short story I wrote at Clarion West. It seemed too ambitious for a short film, but sometimes ‘too ambitious’ is an invitation to problem solve, and here we are.

2) There are so many incredible actors in Anwar. How did you go about the casting process?

Kerry Bishé was dream casting. I wrote a personal letter that we shared through her management team, and she loved the script and came onboard. That was a special moment. In her letter back, she had the idea of adding a lullaby that would carry the emotional through-line of the mother and son. Just the day before, I had talked with my composer Leah Curtis about adding a lullaby. We were so in sync, even before we met, and throughout production.

Jay Abdo is a legendary Syrian actor. My friend Omar Al Dakheel had done a documentary about him coming to Hollywood as a refugee, and I fell in love with his energy, he exudes this child-like wonder. We connected through Omar, and he loved the script, he brought so much energy and belief into the film.

Once we had Jay onboard, we did a casting process to find our 8 and 18 year old Anwars. I was nervous about this, because the role is so specific, and we had to match the look to believe this was the same person. It worked out better than I could have imagined. Our casting director Shyree Mezick did incredible work, and found Leo Etemadi and Saif Haj. We could have built our casting around any of the three Anwars, we were fortunate to have them together.

For Bramwell, our producer Xin Li had worked with Garland Scott on a previous film, and recommended him. I met him and saw it immediately. For Ali, the father in the memories, I realized we would film on a blue screen. Ammar Haj Ahmad is an actor I saw on stage and wanted to work with for many years, so I arranged the production in London, at Broadley Studio, just so I can make it happen. 
So the process was varied, but I have to say: my favourite part of directing is working with other artists, and each of these actors brought so much depth and love into the process, it was a joy.


3) There are so many fascinating interacting themes in Anwar, ethical, technological, and religious. When you were writing it, how did you approach balancing them throughout? 

Thank you! I don’t think so much about balance when it comes to theme, I think of the core. Sometimes it feels like a mess because I haven’t gone deep enough, but if you go deep enough, you find the core, and everything flows from there. For me, the core of this film is about consent. Mona is faced with the question: should she force her son to do what is best for him (in her world) or accept his differing belief (even if it means death). There is a moment where she asks: “if I force him, what happens to the part of him that said no?” And that to me is the heart of the story, all the other themes come from there.

4) You managed to get such impressive performances from the actors. Did you give them more or less guidance on the path of performance? 

I think my role as a director is: to inspire a team of artists to do their best work toward a common vision. I rely on them to bring their depth and experience, and I bring the core truth of the story, and make sure our choices resonate with it. So to answer your question: more guidance in one sense, more trust in the other. I love when actors (or cinematographers, production designers, composers, whomever) bring something I could not have imagined because they are having a dialogue between their own experience and the truth of the story. The moment where Ali asks Mona to make a promise came from Ammar Haj Ahmad in an improvised monologue. There was a moment that Saif Haj added after the encounter in the forest, and a moment that he saved, when we noticed a continuity error and had to problem solve it on set. There was a moment where Kerry Bishé held the integrity of the screenplay when I lost sight of it. We were in the treehouse, and I suggested a blocking for the final scenes, and she noted that we lost the Pièta I had scripted. The film opens on a Madonna and Child and ends on a Pièta. So we reworked the blocking together to find that framing. I have to include Jay Abdo and our cinematographer Chloe Weaver here too, we worked the blocking together, and Jonathan ‘Bridge’ Wilson found a way to capture the intimacy of the voices. It was just five of us in that treehouse, it was our sandbox, and one of the most special moments for me on set.

 
5) You shot in the Santa Cruz redwoods, which is where I live! Why choose that setting instead of something more urban? What do you think it brings to the overall story? 

Oh, that’s wonderful! I love that area. I think redwood trees are spiritual. I love walking through them and noticing what comes up. Anwar is about a mother who is protecting her son from the reality of the world. So I wanted a remote location. In the short story, they live in the Mill Valley Public Library, though I never name it. But I love the interaction of knowledge and nature in that space. When we started to scout, the intention was not to shoot in the Bay Area, we were looking elsewhere. But for various reasons, we started to look in the Bay Area, and we found that beautiful treehouse, the Pinecone by O2 Treehouse. It looks perfect, suspended between redwood trees, and the treehouse image was an important one for me in the story. When they agreed to let us film, we built our locations around there.
 
6) I see that you were mentored at Clarion by Ted Chiang and I was wondering how that process went? 

That is so cool! Ted is amazing, as you know. I reread his story The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate every once in a while, to remind me what is possible in storytelling, it moves me every time. Same with Story of Your Life. Eric Heisserer’s adaptation with Arrival is what inspired me to start exploring personal stories through a science fiction lens. So, in a way, it was a full circle for Anwar. Clarion West is a special place, I cannot say enough about that community and that workshop. There are milestones in your creative development, moments that feel like a before-and-after. For my directing, it was working with Nina Foch. For my screenwriting, it was Ruth Atkinson. For my storytelling, not just short fiction, but my capacity to write with curiousity and joy, it was Clarion West. There were fifteen of us over six weeks, with a different mentor each week, a legend of science fiction. Andy Duncan, Eileen Gunn, Caroline M. Yoachim and Tina Connolly, Nalo Hopkinson, Sheree Renée Thomas, and of course, Ted Chiang. I’m still in a fiction group with some of my fellow writers, Joule K. Zelman, Sagan Yee, and Stefan Slater. We continue to inspire and support each other. So much of it is about the space to experiment and fail. But since you asked about Ted, here is one takeaway: Ted has an incredible mind for theme. His notes would often be in the form of: your story has this and that theme, but it would be stronger if you choose one. I learned a lot from seeing him think through stori

 
7) What's next for you? 

I’m in preproduction for a feature, Alien Boy, a science fiction inspired by my childhood. I moved to Canada as a refugee from the first Gulf War, and was convinced that I would be abducted by aliens. I think it was invasion trauma, displacement trauma, I missed my home and family in Kuwait so much, and I was afraid of being taken even farther away. So this film explores the theme, not through autobiography, but through the basic premise of a child refugee who becomes the target of alien abduction. Very much inspired by Steven Spielberg, in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 

There is also the short story version of Anwar coming out in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It goes more indepth into the world: the rise of everpersons, the war that followed, the choices Mona and Ali had to make about their son. I am excited to see the story out there, and I have other stories in the same world, maybe even as a series or a novel.

I am deep in research on a horror mystery set in the Old West, based on true events, called Desert Beast. That started as a short story but is becoming a novella. I have some screenplays in the works as well. One is an adaptation of my short story On the Mysterious Events in Rosetta, a horror mystery set during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Another is an exploration of the ways we censor ourselves and each other told through fictional memories of the Hays Code in Hollywood, called The Golden Age of Censorship. There are a lot more stories in the works, more than I can live to make. But I hope to make a lot of them, including the feature version of Anwar!

Let me get this out of the way; Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox is a fucking fantastic film. Hilarious, perfectly-paced, well shot, strong acting, an exceptional cast, and dark as hell, it’s an absolute blast of a picture! The crowd at its World Premiere at Cinequest was raucous, and every beat seemed to play exactly as it should have for the crowd.
            But enough actual criticism, let me get into the meta-physical and scientific stuff the film brings up.
            First, the time-traveler’s paradox – a scientist (or an engineer, I guess) builds a time machine that can send them back in time one minute. The time-traveler then kills themselves, well, their old self, thus making it impossible for the future version of themselves to be there....or so the thought experiment goes. In a slightly more complicated version, the scientist kills his former self in the moments before he can activate the machine, thus meaning that there would be no way for him to end up in the past in the first place.
            Supposedly, this will lead to a time paradox, an unstable state of the universe. Some would say that this would lead to the universe folding in on itself. Some would say that this would lead to a thing called a ‘snap’ where the instant the paradox becomes evident, the universe resets to the last point where there was stability. Some would say a new set of universes would be created in which the paradox is has not occurred because the multiverse allows for the creation and destruction of universes fairly easily. And some would say nothing would happen.
            In Tim Travers & the Time Traveler's Paradox, Tim builds a time machine to send himself back on minute, and then he kills himself.
            And at first, nothing happens.
            Sort of.
            It’s messy.
            So, after killing himself a few times, he eventually collects several versions of himself, and as a team they begin to…well, all sorts of things.
            And here’s the question that gets answers, but also not asked: is Tim trying to conquer the question of what happens after the paradox, or does he simply want to kill himself and not actually die?
            That’s the type of movie this is, and it’s why I think it’s one of the best science fiction films I’ve seen in a long, long time.
            Because there are big questions in here, and there are some things that hit hard exactly because they’re bigger questions that you’d expect in a foul-mouthed scifi flick where a LOT of people get shot in the head. There’s an aspect of identity that gets presented, as each individual Tim is presented as a different character (and the nature vs. nurture argument that would lead to is MASSIVE) and that gives lead actor  Samuel Dunning the chance to play everything from the standard-issue Tim Travers (egotistical sociopath with the emotional depth of a cocktail olive who just wants to be right about the whole paradox thing) to New Tim Travers (deeply egotistical and self-obsessed sociopath who can only think about fulfilling his desires and fuck-all about the paradox) and even gets to play two sides of a romance. It’s an incredible series of performances, assisted in pre-effect work by the body double David Babbit, who physically inhabits the part with such precision that it’s hard to tell when he’s in there with Dunning’s face stitched on digitally afterwards. That’s an impressive feat.
            The rest of the cast is phenomenal. Director Stimson Snead, is great as a hitman who isn’t as on top of everything as he should be. Danny Trejo is a hitman who is probably the deepest thinker (and perhaps even the deepest feeler) in the universe. Joel McHale plays a radio show host who is basically Art Bell meets Ira Flato. He’s hilarious in the role as the guy who brings a certain amount of skepticism towards reality which is why Coast-to-Coast AM is still a lot of fun even with George Noory at the console. Keith David makes a strong appearance, and has a wonderful back-and-forth with two Tims, and there’s an excellent group of characters who hang out in the bar, some of whom seem far wiser than you’d expect from a barfly.
            And then, there’s Felicia Day.
            She plays the assistant to the radio host and goes on a date with Tim early on. She gets first hand evidence of Tim’s experiment and freaks out! It’s a hilarious moment, and one which get me thinking – her reaction is extreme, and when I asked Felicia about it in the Q+A she said she’d played the character as angry especially at Tim for being right about the whole time-travel thing. Tim’s reaction to the fact that he’s gone back isn’t anger, it’s confusion. He’s at that moment in the experiment cycle when the results aren’t matching the expected outcome, and thus he has to go about solving why without lashing out.
            OK, he does lash out, but there’s way more to that.
            The act of killing his previous self is an excellent metaphor for destructive growth, the kind you read about on Facebook. Instead of saying “yeah, I sucked, but now I don’t as much,” he literally murders the earlier version. It’s pretty clear Tim isn’t a big fan of humanity, and that includes himself. He likes science, the predictability, the reality, the messy brush with playing God by knowing the outcome and bringing it out into the world. It kinda comes off like he was a serial killer who would not have ever killed anyone if he had to face any sort of consequence, and in the time-loop he created, there were no consequences. It’s a really smart piece of writing to bring that out, and the performance of the material is great, too. It’s a lot like watching Man Bites Dog, where there’s no emotional response to the act of murder/suicide, but there is strong reaction to the outside situations and scenarios.
            The metaphysical aspects here are fascinating. There are multiple Tims running around, but there’s also only one Tim, but from different points in time. There’s an argument to be made that this would be evidence of the lack of a soul, or that consciousness itself is merely based on chemical interactions. Or, as I read it, none of that comes into play because this isn’t duplication; this is re-positioning. There are no questions about that because the only thing that’s changed is the location in space-time, bringing these Tims into the same area.  The amount of matter in the universe is static, of course, though has locally increased in the frame of time we’re experiencing in the film.
            And that is one of the big reasons I loved Tim Travers & The Time Traveler's Paradox. These questions are there, some explicit and some merely hinted at, and while I was laughing my ass off watching it, I was thinking and weighing everything. This is weighty science fiction, and there’s philosophy. The thing that makes this movie even better is that it’s also slapstick, banter comedy worthy of 1930s screwball, and there’s shock value. I love when you can get some much out of a single film, and that alone makes Tim Travers & The Time Traveler's Paradox into an absolute gem of a movie! 

I love Boy Bands.
             Well, a particular flavor of them, more in the mode of New Kids on the Block that N*Sync or Backstreet. Maybe it’s that I came of High School in their peak period and once had an NKOTB bedspread. Maybe it’s because "Step-by-Step" is an absolute bop, and "Please Don’t Go Girl" has everything a ballad needs. Who knows, but also, it’s good stuff.
                 Fanatic is the kind of short that wakes me up from a slump of those films that never quite hit. In fact, it did it so thoroughly, I ended up watching it twice.
                 Charlie and Gerald used to be a boy band in the early 2000s, arguably the high-water mark for American Boy Bandery. They fell out of favor, and now, well now things are tough. They need an infusion of cash, and faster than a bunch of quickees behind a dumpster can provide.
                   And then there’s a contest!
This contest could save ‘em up real good, and there’s stiff competition, and old wounds to overcome.
This is kinda a ‘We Gotta Put on a Show to Save the Farm!’ short, and it does that really well. There’s more layering here, with hilariously dark humor, Behind the Music sensations, and an overall spirit that Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland would have been proud of.
                   Probably Judy a bit more than Mickey...
                The real key to this short is that these are two characters who are utterly lovable, even if they might not be surface likable. You pull for them despite their flaws, and hope that they’ll reach for the brass ring, and maybe grab it. These are characters with charm, and flaws, and flawed charm, and all of that adds up to making us root for them not in spite of those flaws, or even because of those flaws, but with those flaws they carry along the way. That is something a great film does - it lets you see what might be your story as seen through the eyes of someone else. 
                    Not me though; I can't sing. 
                 Andrew Chappelle, who I’ve been seeing just about everywhere the last few years, is great as the co-star and wrote the piece. The direction by Taran Killam (of Saturday Night Live fame, but more importantly, the best thing about Drunk History re-enactments!)  is superb, and that entire short plays out as a crowd-pleaser that takes a turn or two before you realise that those are the kind of turns that happen only in a world where songs like "U + Me = Us (Calculus)" or "I Want it That Way" could be a reality. The world we’re given here is far more full of joy and potential than ours, and the lens we view it through is an excellent example of how you film a fantasy without filming a fantasy.
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                  Fanatic shows as a part of Something Funny on Sunday, August 20th at the Hammer Theatre in Beautiful Downtown San Jose, and then again at the ICON Showplace in Mt. View on Friday, August 25th.

https://tickets.cinequest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=292635~a12ee803-7eae-437e-8208-1c4d52da2020&epguid=330ab4d6-45cd-4e3a-a87e-02c739b12dbb&
 

The story of America in the 20th century is the story of Jazz.
               The major names in the history of Jazz are some of the most fascinating humans who made it through those decades. Names like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and Billie Holiday are widely known even today, decades after they’ve passed. They were icons of talent, who re-defined American singing traditions, and among their number, though less known today by non-afficianados, is Carol Sloane.
               Her talent, staggering. Widely-held by other performers as one of the great jazz interpreters, Carol Sloane was in the midst of some of the most important moments in the development of American music. Not only was she a contemporary, and friend, of folks like Ella and Carmen McRae, but she was there as the world of rock ‘n roll became the dominant form of popular music.
               The documentary Sloane: A Jazz Singer, looks at Carol Sloane’s career as she prepares for a show at Birdland. Now in her 80s, she’s got a show at such a legendary venue and it’s built around the reveal of the power she still possesses in performing for a live recording.
               And as powerful a performer as she still is, her personality is even more powerful.
               Sloane telling us her story, the ups and downs of several decades, from the heights of the Tonight Show and performing around the world, to working as a legal secretary, she has had a life and knows how to pass her memories to us with clarity. She imparts her triumphs and her failures with the same passion: the passion of the performer. She’s giving us the story, her story, and when things get heavy and darker, she doesn’t shy away, she goes into it, through it. She demonstrates that she is a human who understands the path of time, and what every decision means, and what it meant. She seems to understand her life as a road, and it passed through some unpleasant, and often boring, neighborhoods, but it also gave her grand vistas.
               This is a film constructed around interviews, but formed through the use of archive materials. Television performances, hundreds of photos, and perhaps most impressively, audio tapes. The way it plays visually is so impressive, and deeply textured, both in image and sound. This isn't verite, not even slightly, nor is it archive-constructed like Amy, but a hybrid that takes the best of both and runs in the interplay. At times I was brought into the world of the archive doc, but the moment I got the familiar feeling of oversaturation in memorabilia, bam, Carol Sloane of 2019 reappears and takes it all over again. 
               The incredible stuff is the stuff that is closer to Carol than to the many superstars whose names are still widely celebrated. When we see or hear Carmen McRae or Ella or Dizzy, we recognise them, but we connect with Carol, she engages us so deeply that they become a part of her story, not Carol Sloane being an ornament on their legendary tree. Perhaps nothing makes the point of the power of Carol Sloane more than the fact that when he hits us with that show we've been waiting for, and we're through to the end, I instantly wanted to hear the whole thing. 
 This is a wonderful documentary, and director Michael Lippert has choreographed a film that is the story of a life and its intersections. 
               Sadly, Carol Sloane left us in January, but this documentary serves as a stronger, more-lasting memorial than any tombstone ever could.  
               Sloane: A Jazz Singer shows Monday, August 28th at the Mountain View ICON Theatre.
               https://tickets.cinequest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=292610~a12ee803-7eae-437e-8208-1c4d52da2020&epguid=330ab4d6-45cd-4e3a-a87e-02c739b12dbb&
 

I have lived in the Santa Cruz mountains of Northern California for almost nine years. 

The mountains are a strange place. They draw you in and somehow change you. When you look the first time, you kinda see it, but like the proverbial frog in the proverbial pot, you sink in as it gets weirder around you. All that may be why I became so engrossed by Hundreds of Beavers, arguably the single-most avant garde feature I've seen in years. 

The premise is this: an applejack salesman, Jean Kayak (played by the amazing and long-named Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), sees his entire operation blow-up, and thus he is set to a new path, becoming a fur trapper. He takes on the creatures of the forest in a life-or-death battle, and sets about fulfilling a quest, Well, a couple of quests. It's very much structured like a video game, complete with side-quests and map-cuts. This is a structure that a lot of science fiction and fantasy films have taken in recent years, but this doesn't seem to play in those fields at the same time as being exactly in that space. 

And in that realm lies its brilliance. 

The look of the film is black-and-white, high-contrast/concept. The work they did with backgrounds is amazing, and it turns the film into a wonderland. Immediately I came to the sensation of Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World, or even more closely, Night Mayor. It's not just the black-and-white, but the use of the contrast to bring us in to a place that is either charming or disquieting, usually in equal measure. The setting's non-reality is key to the marvel of the film because it plays in a universe that is almost exactly the same as Bugs Bunny and his ilk inhabit. 

The lack of almost any dialogue ramps it up, especially when we get the sound of blubbering tears or screams. The atmospheric sound seems a natural encounter, and the breaking of it to be a transgresion. This ties it to the silents in a much more real way than The Artist managed. They both feel like silent films, but here, they're working with the idea and tropes and when they do give us intentional words/utterances, they mean something. The sound design is so smart, minimalist, full of nuance, but precise. 

The action is both surreal and comical, like in Looney Toons. The way everything is presented is with a sense that Jean is unbreakable, an unkillable machine bent on taking out his terrible fur-covered foes, but he is surrounded by death... or at least the kind of death that is represented by 'X's across the eyes and drag-marks across the snow. Here, we are given a slapstick reality that plays in the unreal as much as a Mario Bros. game, but the stakes are actually there. 

In Hundreds of Beavers, we get little things that add up. A great bit of physical acting, when Jean nearly goes eye-first into a stump that has been beaver-gnawed into a stake-like death device, is just one of dozens of Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton-worthy pieces of physical comedy. The cinematography amps everything up, and there are times I'm biting my nails like I would watching Safety Last at The Stanford. 

The fun bit is that every animal is a giant, fur-suited human. This is the closest it ties to the cartoon world. They're big, and they have so many human attributes that play off that size. This makes Jean's hunt for beaver into a great big comedy treasure hunt that finds more and more with every turn of the spade. 

This is one of the finest pieces of truly unique cinema you'll ever see. It builds beautifully, it never pauses too long to let the air out of the audience, nor moves too quickly so that nothing lands. That sweet-spot is something that many films, especially surrealist films, miss. 

You might remember a short film I talked about obsessively years ago: ‘Lullaby for Lucious & Sumat’ by Alvin Campana. The connections between the two feel deep: the use of large furry characters, puppetry (and the fish in this one are AWESOME!) the idea that the world is different in ways we both do and don't understand, and most importantly, the way that the setting falls somewhere between Magical Realism and Deep Fantasy, like Dali fighting Borges with Philip K. Dick as the ref. 

You really should set aside the time to give Hundreds of Beavers  watch. It's one of those viewing experiences that you will absolutely cherish. 

You can see Hundreds of Beavers as a part of CineJoy through March 12th.
 https://creatics.org/create/cinejoy/showcase/moviepage/267118/Hundreds-of-Beavers

I chat with the amazing Colin Babcock about the fantastic short Mindbender The Cow! creatics.org/cinejoy/moviepage/140700#!#pills-all ​