In her philosophy and film classes, senior Laila Mahan has always been interested in the experience of living somewhere you don’t belong.
A Film and New Media Studies major, Mahan always knew she wanted to do her thesis about an immigrant.
“Both of my parents are immigrants,” she said. “The way that an immigrant lives their life in another nation [has] just always been so fascinating to me.”
The film follows a solitary, Middle Eastern taxi driver who, while helping an older woman do errands every day, falls in love with her beautiful neighbor who she watches through her window. One day, he sees the young woman get mugged and “is nominated by the people to take her to the hospital.” He then needs to decide whether to drive back and see her at the hospital or not.
Mahan’s study in Barcelona, combined with her interest in foreign movies, became the inspiration for the story. Her love of Eastern European films, “really low-light… dark comedy-ish [but] charming in a weird way,” along with Charlie Chaplin and even philosophers Camus and Sartre combined to give life to Halim, Arabic for gentle, mild, and patient.
Studying in Barcelona, Mahan thought the film would be about a pickpocket and was interested in the city’s voyeur culture. Her idea encompassed “a pickpocket who stole a woman’s purse that had an engagement ring in it, and kind of weirdly, that became the Rosemary character,” the woman Halim falls in love with. But, after meeting with her advisor Clay Haskell about her initial script, they decided Mahan should keep her ideas but rewrite everything.
“In all [my film] classes, the script was never the part that I spent the most time on,” recalled Mahan. “Usually we would let our actors improv their lines… and that was also the first thing we had to do after we pitched it.”
Yet, after finally rewriting her script to her satisfaction, she still couldn’t find her main actor. Especially with a low-dialogue script, “if the lenses aren’t the ones that I want, no one is really going to care, but if this person is not doing a convincing role in these emotional scenes… [it’s] the one thing that could break the movie,” said Mahan. After casting calls in the Springs and Denver, and even three dispatching units of actual taxi drivers, Mahan found freshman Joshua Zambrano.
“My first reaction to the script was I immediately knew that it was going to be a foreigner,” said Zambrano. “It was just a coincidence because lately I have been doing a lot of that.” Maham accredits this to Zambrano’s theater background. “Everything’s very expressive…and emotional because he has to translate it so much farther than he would in a close-up camera,” she said.
Mahan makes most of her student films with friend and fellow filmmaker, senior Charley Bayley, so she finds directing individually a challenge. “A kind of awkward moment with myself during the first shoot was when I realized that everyone here needs to do what I tell them to do,” says Mahan. “So it better be f**** good, and if it’s not good, then I won’t have someone by my side to call me out on it… I trust in those I learned from and hope for the best.”
At first glance, Mahan appears the saddest of the senior thesis films, but she hopes that both a general audience, and especially an immigrant audience, wouldn’t want to be like Halim. “He has found something really comfortable, stuck to it, and not allowed to himself to gain anything out of his situation, and I hope no one else does that,” Mahan says.
Make sure to catch Mahan’s film and all the senior thesis projects during Block Eight as part of the Senior Film Theses Screening in Celeste Theater.