At VIFF, Ava Maria Safai's Foreigner blends teen-angst horror with the immigrant experience
High-school hell meets a literal demon in the North Vancouver writer-director’s partly autobiographical feature
Foreigner screens at the Rio on October 6 at 6 pm and at International Village on October 11 at 7 pm. Director Ava Maria Safai hosts a Q&A at both screenings
THE SCREENPLAY WAS written on a Friday. It was workshopped with friends on Saturday. A budget was drawn up on Sunday and the grant proposal submitted the day after that. Some months later and against all the odds, Foreigner arrives as one of the more exciting local efforts at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival.
“I was like: if it happens it happens. And If it doesn’t, I’ll just apply next year,” says North Vancouverite Ava Maria Safai in a call to Stir. “It’s the fastest I’ve ever written anything. I’m trying to write my second feature right now and it’s taking weeks. This one was like a stroke of luck.”
Safai is an aggressively talented multi-threat—actor, musician, filmmaker—but Foreigner seems to be blessed with an unreasonable share of luck. The partly autobiographical film centres around Yasamin, an Iranian immigrant entering the Canadian school system in the early 2000s who pores over TV sitcoms and teen beauty magazines in her effort to integrate.
She’s played in a luminous debut performance by Rose Deghan, who was discovered by slim chance in an Ontario suburb. Deghan could speak Farsi and boy, she can act—it’s excruciating to watch Yasamin face her new classmates for the first time—but just as importantly, adds the filmmaker, “she reminded me of myself when I was 10 or 11, very childlike, expressive, like an animated figure but with depth.”
The film is further distinguished by its warm portrayal of an immigrant family (Safai’s parents left Iran just after the 1979 revolution) and Ashkan Nejati turns in another winning performance as a father who’s more goofy than stern, at least until he observes Yasamin submitting to the influence of archetypal frenemy Rachel Stanford (Chloë MacLeod), a blond prom queen flanked by cartoonish henchgirls Kristen and Emily.
But it’s Yasamin’s grandmother Zoreh (Maryam Sadeghi) who first recognizes the arrival of a demon into their lives. The film boasts a light touch and a lot of humour, but in the end Foreigner is a horror movie cross-hatching familiar themes of teen angst, grief, and cultural disintegration.
“I stumbled on these research papers on a demon from the Middle East call the Zar,” explains Safai, “which possesses people when they immigrate from one country to another. It’s a real phenomenon. For instance, when people would go from Africa to Iran, there would be these weird repeating patterns of people banging their heads against the wall, speaking in tongues, that kind of thing. And it also happened to migrating Iranians. The only way to heal it is through music and beating a drum.”
By pure serendipity, Safai’s script suggests western popular culture as a vector for demonic possession, and it turns out that zar is also the word used to describe a form of contemporary women’s entertainment in the Islamic world.
Ava Maria Safai.
Safai chuckles. “That’s quite coincidental and great and part of my upbringing was celebrity culture. I’m still willing to fly to another country to see my favourite singer,” she says. “But another lesson I learned is that if I had more time and budget I would have delved into the mythology a bit more. It’s tricky to do on a Telefilm budget your first time around.”
All the same, and notwithstanding the familiar notion of entertainment as a gateway to the supernatural (think Poltergeist), it sounds like Safai—who otherwise works as the artistic director of the Harlequin Theatre Society—perhaps channelled the story as much as she wrote it. As for the existence of demons, she keeps an open mind.
“I believe in bad energy,” Safai admits. “I have evil-eye bracelets and I wear them because I feel like if I’m not protecting myself, bad energy latches onto me. I have friends who love witchcraft and tarot and stuff, and they’re like, ‘Ava, crack an egg into a glass, do an egg cleanse.’ I believe in positive and negative aura.”
And as for Rachel? No amount of skepticism will ever convince us that Rachel isn’t real.
“Everyone has a Rachel,” affirms Safai. “Even Rachel has a Rachel. Everyone is scared of someone, growing up. I’m sure I’ve been a Rachel to someone at some point. Everyone has been bullied and everyone bullies. But yeah, Rachel is very real, and very scary, and all over high school.” 
Related Articles
