A note on my friend Ahmed
I first met Ahmed while working on a short film in Rhode Island freshman year. He got really sick one day which was great because it meant that I got the honor of being Assistant Camera for a day. He introduced himself as “Achmed”, and when his friends were confused he said “Well, every time someone asks me what my name is and I say “Ahmed” they think my name is Ed. So now I just say ‘Achmed’.” A year later I referenced the joke and he thought it was hilarious and wondered how I came up with that.
As a sophomore he asked me and some friends to help him make a feature film. He tried to win his ex-girlfriend back and she wouldn’t take him, so he told her he was going to make a movie about her, and so there we were. Kassandra with A K, a movie about Ahmed’s ex-girlfriend. He tried to get the actual Kassandra to play herself in the movie about their breakup, and when she declined he tried to covertly get her into the background of a scene in the film anyway.
It was a fun shoot, involving house fires, drunk bums, and illegally filming on the T, guerilla-style. We started noticing, though, that a lot of the expensive film was being wasted. We’d finish a scene, and then Ahmed would have the DP keep rolling for no reason, even as the actors broke character and we started to get ready for the next shot. If there was a few feet of film left in the roll at the end of the day, he would say “Let’s just get a shot of all of us dancing in this stairway.” I never saw a script for the film, and even in the actual scenes it seemed like most of it was just being made up as they went along. I didn’t understand how any of it could come together to make sense, I didn’t even know what the film was about, and to this day I’m convinced Ahmed didn’t know what it would be about either. When he screened the first cut for me a year later, I expected a mess.
I was surprised to find out that I was part of the cast. It wasn’t “a movie about Ahmed’s ex-girlfriend,” it was a movie about Ahmed making a movie about his ex-girlfriend. There are actually three levels to Kassandra with A K: the scripted story about Ahmed and his ex-girlfriend, the slightly less scripted and ad-lib-heavy story about Ahmed making this film about his ex-girlfriend, and the unscripted documentary about us making that film. These scenes are weaved together so that you’re never quite sure which plot you’re watching - whether Ahmed is playing himself as a lover, himself as a filmmaker, or just himself. And it’s amazing.
I didn’t really understand why it worked so well until I saw the video above. Ahmed is leaving to “be home in Abu Dhabi indefinitely,” and I take this as a sort of goodbye to his closest friend. It’s just a compilation of shots of the two of them goofing around, like when a 12-year-old finds a camera for the first time, but it’s funny and captivating and charmingly honest. In class when we learned about cinéma vérité, I didn’t understand it at all, but now I do. This is cinéma vérité at its best. Watch it, you’ll know what I mean.
It’s like they planned on shooting a fiction film and then just cut all of the scripted parts out. When I was 14, I helped my friend shoot a movie, and for some reason when she edited it, she used the shots where everything went wrong, the mis-takes, instead of the good ones. I thought it was pretty funny at the time and didn’t understand why she chose those scenes. But now I get what Ahmed figured out a long time ago. Fiction gets boring. There’s something magic about home movies, about capturing unscripted life on tape. Something very real. As a filmmaker, it means you stop trying to manipulate and deceive your audience and just say “Look at this, this happened. Isn’t that interesting?” Sometimes the story you’re trying to tell isn’t nearly as amusing as the one that writes itself in the process.
