Most aspiring filmmakers spend years agonizing over a script in the hopes it gets acknowledged by those in the industry, but for North Vancouver director Ava Maria Safai, a successful script can be crafted in a day.
Safai is one of two B.C. filmmakers to receive this year’s Telefilm Talent to Watch funding, one of 18 to be selected from across the country, and the only director of a horror film to be selected at all.
Her full length feature, Foreigner, is a “Mean Girls meets The Exorcist” story with campy elements and flickers of humour throughout, said Safai.
It follows teenager Yasamin Karimi, an Iranian immigrant settling into a new school in Langley. Yasamin dyes her hair blonde and perfects her English, shedding her culture to try and fit in with the queen bees of her new high school, but as she strays further from her cultural identity she steps closer to a dark, demonic entity that threatens to consume her forever.
The idea for the coming of age horror had arisen almost instantaneously when presented with Telefilm’s prompt of "what does it mean to be Canadian?" The question, said the 25-year-old Canadian-Iranian filmmaker, was one she has long dwelled on herself.
“I spent only a day writing the feature, it was about 80 pages long and it just poured out of me,” said Safai. “It was really written from the heart. I felt like my script came from a place of confusion and a place of anger, and it felt like a thesis statement of the fact that being Canadian can mean many different things, and for a long time in film, it’s only ever meant one thing.”
As an Iranian born in Canada, Safai has drawn on decades of experience balancing multiple cultural identities.
“It always felt like I was living a bit of a double life,” said the filmmaker, on her own high school experience at North Vancouver’s Handsworth Secondary.
“Growing up at home, I would speak one language and I would eat one type of food and experience one culture, and then I would go to school, and the expectation was something entirely different,” she said.
While the cultural landscape has shifted since she was a teenager, with youth more accepting and the notion of Canada being a melting pot of cultures and identities becoming more understood, Safai said she is acutely aware that there are still many young women struggling to navigate the meaning of home.
“I hope that when people watch the movie they can understand the complexities of being Canadian and of identity in general, and just keep a reminder to be true to themselves,” she said. “It is OK to be more than just one thing – Canadian and Iranian, in my case. Human beings are multi-faceted and interesting, and to boil Canadian identity down to simple things such as hockey and maple syrup does not do justice to the ever-growing and sometimes flawed history of this country.”
Safai hopes Foreigner, featuring both Farsi and English languages and a Persian actress, Rose Dehganpour as Yasamin, as its lead, will push the industry to consider better representation in film.
“I would have loved to have been in a Mean Girls, or a film like The Exorcist. Hopefully Foreigner will be able to connect with people all over the world, there’s some hope for some change there.”
The film’s release can be expected in the latter half of 2025.
Mina Kerr-Lazenby is the North Shore News’ Indigenous and civic affairs reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.
