‘I’m getting issues of identity and belonging off my chest’
ACTOR AND RAPPER RIZ AHMED EXPLAINS WHY HIS SHORT FILM IS RELEVANT TO BRITISH ASIANS
OSCAR nominee and acclaimed British Asian actor and rapper, Riz Ahmed, has said his short film, The Long Goodbye, felt cathartic to him even when he watched it on the big screen.
Ahmed stars in director Aneil Karia’s live action short film, which has qualified for the Academy Awards in the shorts categories. The 11-minute piece explores the ideas of inequality and racism in Britain.
Speaking at a screening at the W Hotel in Leicester Square, London, last Tuesday (23), Ahmed said, “It felt very cathartic for me to perform that to camera. It feels cathartic for me even now, to watch it. It feels like something is being heard, and I’m getting something off my chest.”
The Long Goodbye was initially released online due to Covid-19. However, this was the first time after lockdown restrictions were lifted that it was shown on a big screen.
Ahmed said the reactions he received illustrated the lack of representation of British Asians in society.
He recalled: “Someone said to me, ‘I’ve never see a brown family on screen just hanging out, talking with each other, cracking jokes and bickering, and just the everyday-ness of it’. They said, ‘you know what, I was moved to tears more by the first half of it than the second half.’”
Among migrant communities, many ask themselves or are asked the question – ‘where are you from?’ – and this forms the narrative of the Oscar-nominated film.
Ahmed said: “I think myself and Aneil have been asked that our whole lives. It’s a seemingly innocuous question, but there’s a question underneath that question which is, ‘where do you belong?’
“The question is one that is kind of spinning around in our heads, particularly at the time when we made this film, at a time of rising xenophobia in the past few years.”
The Long Goodbye depicts the struggles and cultural experiences ethnic minorities face in a majority-white society.
Ahmed describes the narrative as a break-up letter to Britain amid Brexit (the short film was released online at the time of the UK’s exit from the EU). It includes elements of his relationship with the UK and how it feels to be living in a racist nation.
The Wembley-born British Pakistani star said, “I feel like as filmmakers of colour, you spend your time telling stories, responding to someone else’s narrative.
“And just being able to kind of strip all that away and go, ‘actually, here’s what’s going on in the back of my head and the deepest, darkest corners in my mind, and here’s how I feel.’ There’s something very, very liberating about that and breaking the fourth wall.”
The English film critic, Mark Komode, who was a moderator at the screening, said the “most scary line for me is ‘It’s happening, it’s happening’ as if we’ve always expected this, but this is happening now.”
Ahmed responded: “I think it’s set in our nightmares, but the place it’s also set in is a tomorrow we hope never comes. Yesterday, that was in Srebrenica, and in New Delhi, during the pogroms just last year.
“It’s happening in a specific place, but also in this kind of otherworldly dream, like a forever place.”
In the film, Karia and Ahmed have portrayed what it feels like to have an identity crisis, not being able to fit in, hated and looked down upon in a country which caters for white middle-class people.
Karia, who is from an Indian, Irish, Ugandan and Welsh background, said, “This is a kind of fictional, heightened dystopian nightmare future kind of thing, which I think is how people understandably view the scenario – as something fictional and very far away and abstract.
“It’s an intellectual concept people are willing to grapple with.”
He noted that during the production of the film, the conversations about such scenarios and events were what made them – Karia and Ahmed – connect.
“Those conversations were really quite moving to me because when you have a kind of powerful feeling, but you can’t express it in words, and when somebody does that for you, it’s always quite a moment, Karia explained.
“What we were connecting with was that these don’t feel so fictional to us. It feels like a scenario that lies constantly in the back of your mind, niggling away as you’re talking about that very specific moment that we made. It did feel particularly poisonous.” ■ is available to view on