Text by Andrew Rodgers
Writer-Director Ramin Bahrani just added another major accolade to his already crowded trophy cabinet. In early September, the Winston-Salem-born filmmaker’s third feature, Goodbye Solo, held its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and received the prestigious fipresci International Critic’s Prize. The film then traveled to Canada and had its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, where audiences responded eagerly and the buzz continued to build. For anyone already familiar with Bahrani’s career, Goodbye Solo proves itself to be a natural next step in his evolution as an exciting young filmmaker and chronicler of people on the margins of society.
The film, which was shot almost entirely in Winston-Salem, NC where Bahrani was born and raised, tells the story of Souléymane (aka Solo), a young Senegalese taxi driver who is hired by a tough 70-year-old white southerner named William to drive him to the peak of a secluded mountain in two weeks’ time. As Solo comes to understand William’s plan, he devises one of his own—to befriend the stubborn 70-year-old and dissuade him from jumping off the rock before the two weeks are up. The film’s climactic finale takes place at Blowing Rock in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the two men are forced to accept their choices.
“Solo’s kindness towards the stranger he meets…is both rare and sorely needed in a world so focused on war, greed, oil and the differences between cultures,” Bahrani says. “But Solo is also a complex man, full of flaws, who comes to learn and change dramatically from his encounter with William. Ultimately, Solo must find the courage and strength to love his new friend selflessly in order to help him do something seemingly horrible, or leave him to face it alone. It is a decision and task not easy for any man to face.”
Inspired by a pair of real-life people that Bahrani came to know during his years in Winston-Salem, the film features newcomer Souléymane Sy Savané in the title role and veteran supporting actor, Red West (best known for smaller roles and also for being one of Elvis Presley’s closest friends), as the elderly William. Bahrani says a distribution deal is imminent.
Bahrani first made a name for himself in the indie film world with his debut feature, Man Push Cart, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2005 and went on to play at Sundance and received three Independent Spirit Award nominations. His follow-up, Chop Shop, premiered at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes in 2007 and screened at both the Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals. Both films established Bahrani as an auteur filmmaker with a particular knack for telling stories about people on the margins of society. Goodbye Solo continues that through-line.
“I was attracted to each film for different and very specific reasons,” says Bahrani, “but one reason which connects them all is my desire to know about characters and locations I knew nothing about and which I do not normally see depicted in cinema. They are all outsiders in the way I think every conscious human being is an outsider—by which I mean we are all wondering what we are doing in this world, how should we behave in it and what is it here for. This anxiety makes us all ‘outsiders.’ Like the Iranian poet Rumi says: ‘Where have I come from, why was I brought here? Where am I going, in the end You did not show me my home.’”
Born in 1975 to Iranian parents who had moved to America in 1968, Bahrani attended Columbia University and later worked in the production office of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Before making his first feature film, he worked a series of odd jobs to sustain his writing and short filmmaking, including stints as a bartender, truck driver, manager of a bed and breakfast and telemarketer. In 1998, long before he made Man Push Cart, he traveled to Iran for the first time and stayed for three years to learn about his roots and the culture. While there, he took his first stabs at longer stories and made a medium-length “thesis” film called Strangers.
With three well-received films under his belt over the last four years, Bahrani has quickly established himself as not only very prolific, but also a filmmaker with a unique perspective and an uncommonly simple, honest and realistic style. And he shows no signs of slowing down. His next project (which he calls, “a crazy western!”) takes place in the American West of the 1850s. Bahrani has been researching and writing for the past few months and even took some time this past summer, after finishing Goodbye Solo, and before releasing Chop Shop in Europe, to do some location scouting.
“I tend to work a lot, nearly all the time. But I have also had great collaborators with whom I work, which makes things go faster and their contributions make the films better. I hope to be able to keep making a film every one or two years,” says Bahrani. “I am a curious person, and tend to get bored quickly. So thus I keep making films.”
