CANR
WORK TITLE: You’re Embarrassing Yourself
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PERSONAL
Born December 27, 1984, in New York, NY.
EDUCATION:Smith College, B.A. (film and theatre), 2007; New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, M.A. (film directing); attended Queen Mary, University of London.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Filmmaker, actress, script writer, writer, activist.
AWARDS:Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, 2012; Sundance Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize, 2018, for The Miseducation of Cameron Post;
WRITINGS
Script writer for films and television Nose Job, 2010; The Slope, 2010; Appropriate Behavior, 2014; The Bisexual, 2018; The Miseducation of Cameron Post, 2018.
SIDELIGHTS
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Akhavan is a film and television writer, director, and actor who produces queer stories that highlight female sexuality, identity, and shame. A child of Iranian immigrants, Akhavan also writes about fitting in, girls confronted with body image and bulimia, finding her sexual identity, and coming out to her traditional parents. She studied film and theater at Smith College and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her feature film debut, Appropriate Behavior, draws from the breakup of her first lesbian relationship and shows how women struggle as much as men to grow up. Her movie The Miseducation of Cameron Post received the 2018 Sundance Grand Jury Award.
Akhavan’s debut book, You’re Embarrassing Yourself: Stories of Love, Lust, and Movies, collects seventeen humorous and sometimes dark essays and stories of how she overcame society and her parents’ constant pressure to look pretty, be popular, and grow up. From being voted the ugliest girl in her high school, to getting a nose job at her parents’ urging, and resorting to bulimia and cutting herself as means to cope, she delves into cringe-inducing and self-destructive aspects of growing up a child of immigrants and discovering her sexual identity. The essays cover her failed relationships, her first heartbreak, her Iranian-American community’s disapproval of her bisexuality, her path to maturity, and her work as an independent filmmaker with the goal of bringing queer films and a voice for female sexuality to the screen.
Praising Akhavan’s journey to adulthood through her essays, a writer in Kirkus Reviews noted: “As she depicts her struggle to come to terms with a complex identity, Akhavan also celebrates the hard-won privilege of self-acceptance. A readably funny and candid memoir.” In Publishers Weekly, a critic commented on “this funny and incisive debut memoir-in-essays” saying “she’s charted an endearingly crooked path to maturity. This is a winner.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
New York Times, November 15, 2018, Eleanor Stanford, “In ‘The Bisexual,’ Desiree Akhavan Grapples with All Kinds of Sexuality,” p. NA(L).
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2024, review of You’re Embarrassing Yourself: Stories of Love, Lust, and Movies.
Publishers Weekly, June 17, 2024, review of You’re Embarrassing Yourself, p. 104.
ONLINE
Huck, https://www.huckmag.com/ (August 30, 2018), Cian Traynor, “Desiree Akhavan Is Film’s Most Exciting ‘Outsider.’”
Desiree Akhavan is film's most exciting 'outsider'
Thursday 30 August, 2018
Text by Cian Traynor
Photography by Abbie Trayler-Smith
Can't stop, won't stop — After winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for a coming-of-age film about LGBT teens, Desiree Akhavan has battled self-doubt to realise her dream as a director. But in a medium with few opportunities for fresh voices, she knows that success is never straightforward.
Desiree Akhavan needs a time-out. She’s standing in the middle of a brightly coloured members’ bar at Sundance London, where her new film The Miseducation of Cameron Post is getting its UK premiere, feeling a bit frazzled.
The place is swarming with people – movie geeks shuffling through lengthy queues, publicists frantically scanning clipboards – and the filmmaker has a lot to juggle: not just Q&A screenings and photoshoots, but the more personal hassles of worrying about ticket allocation and herding loved ones about.
This atmosphere is not made for an intimate conversation with a stranger. Yet after taking a brief moment to herself on the sidelines, the 34-year-old takes a seat and locks into the moment: funny, smart and charmingly candid. Desiree, it turns out, is one of those people who thrives in the face of a challenge.
It started at school. Raised by Iranian parents in New York’s Rockland County, she spent three hours commuting back and forth to the Bronx every day – a routine that made it harder to connect with friends. So to make the biggest impact in the smallest amount of time, she’d write short plays and skits to perform between classes – and when her peers voted Desiree the ugliest person at school, she just turned that into a play too.
That ability to reframe crappy moments turned out to be the making of her career. In 2010, Desiree began a crowdfunded web series about “superficial homophobic lesbians” in Brooklyn called The Slope with her then-girlfriend and co-star Ingrid Jungermann. The pair broke up during the course of the show, which in turn bled into the characters’ lives, making for an on-screen finale built from real-life heartbreak.
In its aftermath, Desiree made Appropriate Behaviour: a feature film about an Iranian-American woman (played by herself) who struggles to come out to her parents after a painful break-up. Having grown up in a culture where being “honest about the truths of life” felt forbidden, Desiree crafted a character who can’t manage to follow the rules or fit in anywhere. The film’s mix of humour and intelligence saw her celebrated as an exciting new voice in cinema, a much-needed antidote to the same tired portrayals of women on screen.
But getting the chance to realise her potential hasn’t been easy. There still aren’t as many opportunities for female filmmakers, Desiree explains, so she and creative partner Cecilia Frugiuele have been working hard to carve out their own space. They’ve spent the last couple of years developing two big projects: The Miseducation of Cameron Post, an adaptation of a novel by emily m. danforth about teens sent to a camp for gay ‘conversion therapy’, and The Bisexual, a comedy series about the taboos of attraction.
“Comedy and sex; being outcast; stories about outsiders – it’s what I’m fascinated by,” she says with a smile and a shrug. “Something in me just pulls it all together.”
You have a habit of turning failures or painful events into something positive. What aspect of your personality enables you to do that?
I think it just is my personality. Like, I think you just called me out. That’s what I do. I’m incapable of letting things slide. It’s a sickness. [laughs] But it’s also wanting to take a situation where you feel disempowered and turn it into something that you have control over. With writing and directing, you have the ultimate control. You’re in the editing room, calling the shots.
Your parents invested heavily in education for you and your older brother; he became a surgeon while you pursued creativity. I can imagine there would’ve been huge self-applied pressure as a result of that. But after being accepted to Sundance for the first time, you called your mom and she said, ‘I always knew. I had so much faith in you.’ Were you aware of that belief? Or did it feel like you were failing?
That was, hands down, the coolest moment ever. [laughs] But yeah, I totally felt that pressure, especially coming from New York which is so success-oriented, and I still do feel like a failure. When it comes to professional success, my parents have been incredibly supportive and really pushed me, blindly believing even when I didn’t. If they wavered, they never showed it… which is weird because the odds of being a working filmmaker are so low. This industry is ridiculously competitive and I think it’s shocking to all of us that it happened. But I think my mom genuinely believed and I was like, ‘You’re living in a fairy tale.’
What is your idea of success then? Because people would see you as successful…
It’s tricky and I keep having to redefine it for myself. I think the problem is that when you’re working – no matter who you are or what you do – you keep moving the bar according to what you don’t have. You just maintain the narrative in your head that you’re a loser. But I achieved what I wanted to achieve so I’m really grateful for that. What’s funny is that the lifestyle doesn’t look the way I thought it would. I thought it would be a lot more lucrative [laughs] and a lot smoother. Instead it’s rocky… and… I like it, but… [long pause] I don’t know.
Maybe you shouldn’t feel totally proud of yourself. Maybe the part of you that feels like a piece of shit motivates you to keep going. Maybe when great filmmakers do mediocre work in their later years, when they start doing the same things over and over again, I wonder if it’s because they’ve just become too pleased with themselves and they don’t have this crippling need to prove it anymore. I have such a need to prove myself.
Desiree Akhavan
How do you balance the need to express yourself creatively with the need to scrape by to make a living?
It’s a hustle. I think the business of being a filmmaker has been a real learning curve for me. It doesn’t come with a rulebook. No one sits you down and explains anything. You just fall on your ass and keep getting up.
But you studied film at NYU, right? So when you enrolled, did it feel like you’d be given a guide?
Nobody can teach you about the business of being a filmmaker because it’s constantly changing. Every year the marketplace is completely different. So it’s about balancing your integrity and telling stories you want to tell and having the control you want to have versus the lifestyle you want to live.
The older I get, the more I become aware of what I can compromise on and what I won’t. As someone who lives the work 24/7, what should that lifestyle look like? What needs do I have to accommodate if I’m constantly doing this job and always thinking about it? It’s become such a big part of my identity… and I think that might be a problem. [laughs]
I have similar problems: perfectionism, fear of failure, performance anxiety. So how do you navigate that? How do you stop giving a shit about whatever is behind the anxiety?
I’m trying to figure that out. Like, therapy? I don’t know. Lately I’ve been trying to meditate and do yoga. I’m trying so hard. The last shoot was a TV show here in London and it kicked my ass. I was just so miserable and so afraid that it didn’t match up to what I had in my head. And with Cameron Post, I love it and I’m really proud; it may be even better than what I wanted to make. But during post-production, we had something totally mediocre.
And I think that’s just the process of making things: feeling like you failed yourself and then just inching your way closer to something that makes sense. You have to become comfortable living in that self-doubt, but I wish that it would just ease up a bit. If I could give advice to myself before I made Appropriate Behavior it would be, ‘Cut yourself some slack. This is a marathon, not a race. You’ll get there.’ And I need that advice right now, making the show. Like, ‘You’re in the middle of editing it. Of course it’s not going to be great.’
It’s hard to believe you saw the film in those terms at one point. The casting, the performances, the cinematography – surely all those things would have been in the rough cut.
They were, but the story didn’t knock you in the stomach. Everyone who came to the [test] screenings was like, ‘Meh.’ You didn’t sit in those rooms. It was so awkward. Oh God, I’ll never forget this call I got from [an editor] who had just seen the rough cut and started listing all these things that were problems – things that I knew, deep down, were problems.
I was in a Tesco in Dalston [East London]; I remember putting my phone on mute and walking through the aisles adding candy after candy. Then I dropped my credit card and walked down Kingsland Road just, like, lost for a while. He nailed every single inadequacy with the film. In those moments it feels like you failed not only yourself but your financiers and your cast and everyone around you. But what was amazing was… we fixed it! We recut the film completely and I learned so much about what it means to take an audience on a journey.
Desiree Akhavan
The morning after Trump was elected, you gathered the cast and told them the film would matter in ways they couldn’t have anticipated before. [Vice President Mike Pence has frequently been accused of supporting conversion therapy.] Now that it’s made, what would you like people to take from it?
I always feel hesitant to answer that question. Like, if you state your intentions then you’re not a very good filmmaker, are you? [laughs] I mean it has a political message… You want to humanise that struggle and show abuse the way you see it; the inherent hypocrisy of gay conversion therapy and how destructive it is.
But I didn’t make it with the intention of teaching people about those specific horrors. It was a perfect setting for a teenage drama because what these kids were going through was so over-the-top – it wasn’t something they could heal themselves from – and it felt more like a metaphor for other theoretical horrors. It just became upsettingly relevant while we were making it. But I’m not naive enough to think that people who strongly believe you can ‘pray the gay away’ would even come to this film.
Tell me about the moment when you realised that creativity was going to be the thing you pursued in life.
It really wasn’t a choice. There’s nothing else I’m capable of doing and my family recognised that too – in a loving, supportive way. They came from Iran and believed that any bit of money they had should be put into our education – and that’s what they did. We went to a very competitive, fancy-pants school. They invested so much time and money into tutors and different programmes to help me succeed academically. But even though I tried so hard, I could never do well.
I had so many jobs throughout school just trying to figure out something I could do – and I was useless at everything. But I wrote plays as a kid, little comedy shorts during recess, and I made people laugh. The first school play I acted in was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and I was the lion. It sounds so cheesy, but my parents had never heard me sing before coming to see that play. I remember afterwards they looked at me like I was a different person. Everyone there looked at me like that. I was 12 and suddenly it felt like I had a secret power… But nowhere else in my life did anyone ever notice me. So when I did theatre, it was like I was doing something viably good compared to how bad I was at everything else.
The change came when I studied at [Smith College]. I wanted to do be a playwright but I just didn’t fit into the programme. There was a theatre community and we clashed; they did Caryl Churchill and a lot of very ‘not me’ material. I quickly realised I was not a theatre person and it hit me so hard that I thought, ‘How am I going to spend my time now? This was all I ever did.’
I always had a hard time connecting to people unless I was making plays with them. But I met this girl who I thought was cool; she wanted to be a director and I wanted to be just like her, so I signed up for whatever she signed up for. And it was like falling in love. I instantly felt at home talking about films and reading them like text. I grew up that way – not watching high-art stuff, but mainstream bullshit – and that raised me.
But it never seemed like something you could do yourself. When I started taking these film classes, around 19 or 20, it was like, ‘Oh shit, the pursuit of this will be my life.’ I never thought in my wildest dreams that I’d be able to go to Sundance but I knew I’d spend my life trying.
Desiree Akhavan
The reason I ask about navigating anxiety is because you’ve spoken about attending rehab for an eating disorder when you were younger, where you learned something important about yourself that became a turning point. That can’t have been easy. Is there anything you took from that experience that still feels relevant elsewhere in life?
You know what the realisation was? That everything was fine. That was it. And that’s what I applied to filmmaking: ‘Stop trying so hard. Just have fun.’ [long pause] The thing about anxiety is that you just have to turn down the volume on the voices. It’s the same with the eating disorder: it’s not like I ‘beat’ anything. Sometimes the volume goes up and you’re like, ‘Okay, the volume is up. Let’s try to turn it down.’ You just breathe through it, but you always feel like a shithead and you always feel like you’re failing people. Like with this TV show, when I think about it, I just want to cry.
If you told me I would win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, I would think that my life would be done, that I would never feel inadequate again and there’d be no qualifier. Done! I would have a stamp that says I’m great and I could look at myself in the mirror like, ‘You’re awesome.’ And that’s not at all the case. But what it has made me realise is that you don’t really need an award to know that. I’m just as talented or untalented as I was before I won. It doesn’t mean anything.
At the end of the day, you’re trying to tell your story and you have to trust your taste. When you hit a rough patch, you just slowly turn down the volume. You don’t marinate in it. And that’s what I’m trying to do now: have faith that I’m doing my best every day. Try again tomorrow. No one’s gonna die; the stakes are relatively low when you consider the fact that everyone will be fine. But it takes a lot of ego to do this work, so you kind of have to hold on to the blind confidence too.
You’ve said that being bisexual is like a superpower because you see sides to both sexes that others don’t. So what is it that people don’t realise about men and women?
That people aren’t that different. It’s so funny, I just read a book that I’m obsessed with called The Power [by Naomi Alderman]. It’s about women developing the ability to release this electrical current, which leads them to become the dominant gender… and they act exactly like men do. It’s the same world we live in, only women are in power and men are marginalised. It’s so fascinating because I see the truth in that.
I’ve dated men who have been more feminine and more maternal or comforting than the women I’ve been with. I’ve dated women who have been more stereotypically masculine. When I first had sex with a man, I thought it would be so different. I thought that I was on for a different ride. And it was like, ‘No… of course it’s the same thing, you idiot!’ It’s just sex.
Relationships are just relationships. It’s your perception from outside that makes you think, ‘How could you possibly have the same kind of intimacy with a man as you would with a woman or vice versa?’ We put on these dresses, these codes, these rules of conduct that are self-imposed. But if you learn to see past those things, you realise that we’re all human.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post is in cinemas 7 September and The Bisexual is coming to Channel 4 this autumn.
This article appears in Huck 66 – The Attitude Issue. Buy it in the Huck Shop or subscribe to make sure you never miss another issue.
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Desiree Akhavan's work unpicks the nuances and humor of identity, sexuality and shame.
Why you should listen
Desiree Akhavan is best known for her films Appropriate Behavior and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which won the 2018 Sundance Grand Jury Award. More recently she cowrote, directed and starred in the Hulu original series The Bisexual. As a television director, she's worked on a breadth of shows including the Emmy-nominated Hacks and Ramy. Her first book, You're Embarrassing Yourself, will be published by Random House in August.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Desiree Akhavan
Akhavan in 2015
Born December 27, 1984 (age 39)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Alma mater
Smith College
New York University
Occupations
Filmmakeractresswriter
Years active 2010–present
Desiree Akhavan (Persian: دزیره اخوان, born December 27, 1984)[1] is an American filmmaker, writer and actress.[2] She is best known for her 2014 feature film debut Appropriate Behavior,[3][4] and her 2018 film The Miseducation of Cameron Post. She appeared in the found footage horror film Creep 2.
Early life and education
Akhavan was born in New York City in 1984. Both of Akhavan's parents fled to the United States following the Iranian Revolution in 1979; Akhavan has stated in interviews that they now identify as American. Her father has not returned to Iran since the 1980s,[5] though Akhavan occasionally visited family overseas as a child.[6] As a child, Akhavan lived in New Jersey before her family moved to Rockland County, New York. As a commuting student, Akhavan attended the Horace Mann School, an independent prep school in The Bronx, for her high school years. During this period of time, Akhavan struggled with feelings of loneliness: "My life was in New York City but I would sleep in the suburbs and I didn’t know anyone there. I didn’t have friends and I didn’t have a life, other than watching television and movies."[6]
Akhavan has attributed her first experiences with American culture through watching TV shows and films.[5] She began writing plays when she was 10 years old and began acting in plays at 13 years old.[7][8]
Akhavan struggled to fit in at school, with negative body images and standards leading her to face eating disorders such as bulimia. "There was one aesthetic, and it was: very thin, very petite, straight hair, straight nose, Petit Bateau T-shirt, 7 For All Mankind jeans, North Face fleece” – but these things take their toll. "I know those girls who fit in at that age, and it was through a sexual power that they couldn’t handle. Power is a really tricky thing, it’s overwhelming. If men had paid attention to me at that age, I would have gotten in trouble."[9]
Akhavan studied Film and Theatre at Smith College, a women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she was "a bit of a loner".[1] After graduating in 2007, she studied film directing as a graduate student at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She also spent a year studying abroad at Queen Mary, University of London.[3][8][10]
Career
Akhavan made her first short film Two Drink Minimum while studying in London as a graduate student.[6] In 2010, she wrote and directed the short film Nose Job.[11]
Akhavan has regularly appeared in her own work following her writing, directing, and acting in the lesbian-themed web series The Slope.[3][12] She and Ingrid Jungermann, her creative partner, were named to Filmmaker's 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2012.[13] The series premiered in 2011.[13]
She plays a writing student in season 4 of Girls. The role was offered to her after Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner saw her film Appropriate Behaviour.[14]
In 2014, Akhavan's film Appropriate Behavior, in which she plays an alternative version of herself, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.[7] The film was first written as her senior thesis paper as a graduate student at New York University.[6] Although it is inspired by personal events in Akhavan's life, such as the break up of her first lesbian relationship,[6] she has asserted that the film is not autobiographical.[5] That year, she was also selected for the Sundance Institute's Episodic Story Lab for her pilot script Switch Hitter.[15]
In 2015, Akhavan was the President of the Queer Palm jury at the Cannes Film Festival.[16]
She has stated she draws inspiration from people such as Todd Solondz and Noah Baumbach.[6]
Channel 4 commissioned a sitcom called The Bisexual to be written, directed by and starring Akhavan.[17] It aired on October 10, 2018 in the U.K. and on November 16, 2018 in the U.S. The sitcom explores misconceptions of bisexuality. In an interview with UK's Bazaar, she said, "To me that was the perfect way to handle bisexuality, through the lens of a lesbian."[2]
In November 2016, it was announced Akhavan would write, direct and produce The Miseducation of Cameron Post, starring Chloë Grace Moretz, and Sasha Lane.[18] The critically acclaimed film won the 2018 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and was officially selected for the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, Toronto LGBT Film Festival, San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival, Outfest, and the San Francisco Indie Film Festival, earning multiple additional nominations and awards.[19]
In an interview about her career with The Guardian, Akhavan proclaimed, "The only mainstream queer female stories have been directed by men-it disgusts me." In the same interview, Akhavan explains her intentions behind directing The Miseducation of Cameron Post. "I didn’t want it to be propaganda, though I think that would be a more commercially successful film. I wanted the tone to be right… Every film about teens is really about the moment they realise that none of the adults know what they’re doing."[9]
On November 17, 2018, Akhavan attended the Vulture Festival, speaking at a sit-down conversation alongside actresses Chloë Grace Moretz and Tatum O’Neal to discuss working in the film industry.[20]
Currently, Akhavan is working on a memoir, Late Bloomer, a collection of personal essays, to be published in 2024.[2]
Activism
Desiree Akhavan is an activist in advocating for the LGBTQ community in the film industry. She recounted in an interview that when she pitched The Bisexual to networks in Los Angeles in 2015, she "was rejected everywhere.” She stated the rejection was “because Americans are terrified of female sexuality,” on Twitter.[2] Her work focuses on queer female stories, such as her films The Miseducation of Cameron Post, The Bisexual, and Appropriate Behaviour.[21]
After doing well at Sundance, The Miseducation of Cameron Post had trouble finding a distributor, which Akhavan contributes to the evident sexism in the industry. "Very few women have won the Sundance award, and it’s not escaping me that the one film that’s about female sexuality, directed by a woman, is having a harder time getting out there," she says. "Things are changing in the industry, but female-driven stories, specifically sexually driven female stories, are very difficult. If there is sex in the film, it has to be a man’s pleasure."[9]
Like many, Akhavan is calling for change in the film industry. "There’s clearly something toxic in this industry, a place where women are paid a quarter of what the men are paid for the exact same job. Clearly there’s something diseased here. And now maybe we’ll see that the work won’t suffer because of this, that it will become exciting and diverse and tell stories we haven’t heard before."[9]
When Akhavan was asked about the future of queer TV in her interview with Bazaar, she said, "There’s less of a separatist feeling the way we had at the time The L Word was being produced, so I think more queer subject matter is inching its way into mainstream television."[2]
In June 2019, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, an event widely considered a watershed moment in the modern LGBTQ rights movement, Queerty named her one of the Pride50 "trailblazing individuals who actively ensure society remains moving towards equality, acceptance and dignity for all queer people".[22]
Personal life
Akhavan identifies herself as a bisexual woman and a Brooklynite.[1][23] She often explores her bisexuality within her work.[2] She has talked about how she and her family are from Iran, where homosexual activity is illegal. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.[2] She has a brother who is a pediatric urologist.[6]
Filmography
Film
Year Title Director Writer Producer Role Notes Ref(s)
2009 The Feast of Stephen Second assistant director; short film
2010 Nose Job Yes Yes No Short film
2010 Ankur Assistant director; short film
2010 Yardsale Assistant director; short film
2010 Phishing Sound mixer; short film
2011 Lena dhe Unë Assistant director; short film
2011 Her Seat is Vacant Production manager; short film
2013 All Her Notebooks Assistant director; short film
2013 My Mom and Other Monsters Production manager; short film
2014 Appropriate Behavior Yes Yes No Shirin Also director and writer; feature directorial debut
2017 Creep 2 No No No Sara
2018 The Miseducation of Cameron Post Yes Yes No
Television
Year Title Role Notes Ref(s)
2015 Girls Chandra 3 episodes
2016-18 Flowers Carol 5 episodes
2016 The Circuit Angie TV pilot [24][25]
2018 The Bisexual Leila 6 episodes
2020 Briarpatch — Director: "Breadknife Weather"
2020 Ramy — Director: "Uncle Naseem"
2020 Monsterland — Director: "Iron River, MI"
2021 Hacks — Director: 2 episodes
2022 I Love That for You — Director: 2 episodes
2023 Tiny Beautiful Things — Director: 4 episodes
Web
Year Title Role Notes Ref(s)
2010–2012 The Slope Desiree Also director, writer and producer [12]
Personal television appearances
Year Title Notes Role Ref(s)
2014 How We Make Movies TV series Herself
2018 Entertainment Tonight Canada TV series Herself
2018 Dykes, Camera, Action! Documentary Herself
2019 Hollywood Insider TV series Herself
Awards and nominations
Year Award Category Work Result Ref(s)
2014 Independent Spirit Award Best Debut Script Appropriate Behavior Nominated [5]
San Diego Asian Film Festival Grand Jury Award Won [26]
2018 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize - U.S. Dramatic The Miseducation of Cameron Post Won [27]
2018 Dallas International Film Festival Grand Jury Prize Nominated
2018 Molodist International Film Festival Sunny Bunny Prize Nominated
2018 Seattle International Film Festival Futurewave Youth Jury Award Nominated
2018 Sydney Film Festival Sydney Film Prize Nominated
2018 São Paulo International Film Festival New Directors Competition Nominated
2018 Transatlantyk Festival: Lodz Transatlantyk Distribution Award Nominated
2018 Valladolid International Film Festival Silver Spike Won
2018 Valladolid International Film Festival Youth Jury Award Nominated
2018 Valladolid International Film Festival Golden Spike Nominated
One of my favourite scenes in Appropriate Behaviour -- Desiree Akhavan's terrific debut film that she directed, wrote and stars in -- comes very early in the film. The protagonist Shirin (Akhavan) meets up with Ken (30 Rock's Scott Adsit), a stoner Brooklynite, in a trendy cafe, in the hope he'll give her a job. His eyes light up greedily when she mentions that her name is Iranian.
"Iranian! Wow! What do you think of that whole situation?" he coos.
Shirin blinks and tries to come up with an answer (she settles for "It's a mixed bag"), but Ken has already moved on: "So tell me, what's the scene like in Tehran? I just read this big article about the underground hip-hop scene in Vice. So you're part of that?" he asks eagerly.
Shirin pauses, just for a beat.
"No, unfortunately I spend most of my time in Iran watching Disney videos with my grandmother while she untangles jewellery," she deadpans back.
So it is with some trepidation that I wait to meet Akhavan in a very similar cafe in west Hollywood. I don't generally expect people to behave like figures from Vice features but, in keeping with her character in the film, the 31-year-old tends to attract some truly cringeworthy stereotyping from other people. This has been going on since she first came to attention with her very funny 2011 web series The Slope, which she made with her then girlfriend Ingrid Jungermann. It poked fun at both gay culture and Brooklyn, and was clearly made by someone who knows both very well.
The cliches, however, have ratcheted up since the Sundance premiere of the critically feted Appropriate Behaviour, the hilarious and moving story of a twentysomething woman trying, not very successfully, to get over a bad breakup while simultaneously hiding her sexuality from her family. The story in the film is total fiction, but there are some personal overlaps between Akhavan and Shirin, and the flurry of press around her can be summed up as : "An Iranian bisexual Lena Dunham!" There is something very odd about how the media will ways in which a young woman is different (Iranian! bisexual!), while at the same time insisting she is exactly like someone else ( the new Dunham! ).
Akhavan is, to her credit, fairly sanguine about being repeatedly reduced to her nationality and sexuality: "It was a fear I had when making the film, and it really came true. But it's not such a bad thing. What's funny is those are the things that made me feel so alienated in my life, and now they're pulled out as my entire life," she smiles over a cappuccino.
Slightly more irksome are the frequent references to Dunham, not because she resents her -- Akhavan, in fact, plays a recurring character in the fourth series of Girls -- but because of the insinuations.
"It's the idea that there's room for only one funny woman whose work can be monetised. It happens with any young female film-maker with humour in her work," she says. "But no one ever looks at [indie film-maker] Alex Ross Perry and says: 'Oh, another Noah Baumbach!'"
Because American critics have got so caught up in looking for the next Lena Dunham, no one has yet compared Appropriate Behaviour with Annie Hall, which, with its relationship-told-in-retrospect structure, clearly inspired Akhavan. With its emotional sharpness balanced against laugh-out-loud lines, Akhavan's movie feels a lot more like something by Baumbach or Sarah Polley than the hipster-awkwardness-as-artform seen in Girls. In a strange way, even though Appropriate Behaviour is, on the surface, dealing with issues ostensibly more niche than in Girls (specifically, coping with a traditional Iranian family while being bisexual), it feels more universal, perhaps because struggles with sex and family are more common than the travails of being a middle-class white woman in Brooklyn.
If Appropriate Behavior is part of any trend, it's that of the rise of smart and funny stories by and about young women, showing that they struggle as much to grow up as male characters have long done in their films. Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha, Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids, Jenny Slate in Obvious Child and, yes, Dunham in Girls, have all recently explored this area. These stories are very different from the twinkly eyed Kate Hudson chicklit films of the past two decades because the women here are depicted in a far more brutal and honest way: they're often broke, usually selfish, sometimes cruel, occasionally promiscuous, frequently intoxicated or high and generally pretty confused. They don't have Bridget Jones's idealised group of friends, let alone Carrie Bradshaw's couture wardrobe. Rarely is there a handsome prince at the end of the story who makes everything all right. Instead of looking like perfect princesses, the women in these stories get messy and smelly. But whereas this is the norm for male characters, it is still seen as so anomalous for female characters to look and behave like this that they can be discussed only by comparison with Dunham.
"No good film-maker looks around to see what other people are making and thinks: I'll make that!" she says. "But things like the manic pixie dream girl, these were the stereotypes that my contemporaries and I grew up with, and there is this influx of narratives because we're responding to those cliches."
Akhavan was born in New York in 1983, just a few years after her parents had emigrated from Iran, and raised there. The whole family would learn about the US together by watching western TV shows and movies.
"None of us are alike so if we could settle on a TV show we all liked, it was the best kind of bonding," she says. While Akhavan and her older brother loved Muriel's Wedding and Saved By the Bell, her father's favourite films were by Mel Brooks.
"As soon as my parents moved to New York they very firmly identified as American. It's not about the shame of being Iranian -- it's about letting go of the past," she says. "Also my father hasn't been able to go back to Iran since 1980 and I think it hurts him too much to think about what he left behind, so his identity is firmly American." To this day, he never follows Iranian news: "He'd rather watch Two and a Half Men or 2 Broke Girls."
One of the things Akhavan learned about from movies was, of course, sex. So it came as quite a shock when she eventually learned first-hand that sex in real life is not quite how it is in the movies: "I thought: am I crazy? Am I doing it wrong?" she says, still sounding flummoxed. As a result, the sex in Appropriate Behaviour is one of the movie's great strengths. It's utterly realistic, not gratuitous or farcical, because Akhavan isn't interested in the erotics but in the subtle exchanges of power that happen between a couple in bed.
"I really care about how sex is depicted and want to be honest in that arena," she says, citing Andrea Arnold and Catherine Breillat as inspirations. "That's why I take my top off in the sex scene because that is absolutely what the character would have done. But now I'm worried people are watching and going: 'Oh my God, it's the director's tits!'"
Akhavan is a delightful coffee companion, exuding the kind of warmth that makes strangers want to tell her their most intimate stories, which she loves. I have to all but physically wrench her back to the interview when she gets distracted by yet another cafe patron who, after eavesdropping on our chat, spends 15 minutes telling Akhavan her life story: "Other people's stories are so fascinating, don't you think?" she says, forcing herself to talk about herself again.
So it's hard to square this warm and sociable young woman with the self-described "weird and ignored" teenager she once was. At school she was, astonishingly, voted ugliest girl and she didn't make her first friend until she was 14. She didn't kiss anyone until she was 17, "and that was only because someone dared someone else to kiss me. That's how much of a weirdo I was." She then corrects herself: "I actually don't think I was interesting enough to be weird. I think it's just that when you're unattractive and young, you disappear."
Akhavan is great at capturing the sense of disappearing in her film: Shirin is often not just on the physical outside of parties, but also mentally -- you see her getting lost in her own memories, in one instance in the middle of a threesome. "When you're not the hottest girl in the room at school," she says, "you get used to being the observer."
The morning we meet it's the day after the Independent Spirit Awards, where Akhavan was nominated for best debut script, an experience she describes as "fun and strange. Emma Stone walked into a party I was at and I was like: 'OK, this party just got too cool for me, I'm done.'"
After school, she went to the all-women university Smith and, once again, she felt like "the ugliest and most ignored student, but for totally different reasons than at school".
In what sense?
"Because I wasn't gay enough! I didn't have a half-shaved head and a pierced septum -- that would have made me the coolest girl. It was really funny to go to Smith, where the aesthetic was the opposite of the New York aesthetic, but I was still at the bottom of the totem pole. But it was also kind of great. When you're constantly on your own, you develop your own criteria about what's cool." And one of those things, she decided, was film-making. After doing a film course at college, she went on to study film as a postgrad at NYU, where she met Ingrid Jungermann, and the two fell in love.
Appropriate Behaviour is partly inspired by her breakup with Jungermann, but the film is not, Akhavan frequently stresses, autobiographical. For a start, her parents didn't react to her coming out the way Shirin's parents do, but that is not to say that coming out was easy. After she told her parents, they didn't talk "for a long time".
"I was heartbroken to have lost my parents, but it was also a really exciting time because I stopped giving a shit about anything. I think all of us are motivated by wanting to do well by our parents -- that's like the universal truth, but especially so for the children of immigrants. I was so driven by it for so long that it literally made me sick at times, and when I let go of that desire my work became 20 times better," she says.
She made The Slope with Jungermann during this period of near estrangement from her parents, which foregrounded her sexuality and acted as a very public form of coming out. Appropriate Behaviour takes this even further, with relatively more explicit sex and greater emphasis on the emotional bond between Shirin and her ex-girlfriend.
By now, however, her parents have fully accepted their daughter's sexuality: "It took about a year but my father made the choice to fully embrace me and this public persona I have of being gay. I think we talk about things more openly because of my work," she smiles, as though that was her intention all along.
Appropriate Behaviour is released in the UK on 6 March
Hadley Freeman
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Guardian Newspapers Limited
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"Desiree Akhavan on Appropriate Behaviour and not being the 'Iranian bisexual Lena Dunham'; The writer and director's new film is a bittersweet comedy of breakups, threesomes and deadpan hipsters. Just how autobiographical is it?" Guardian [London, England], 5 Mar. 2015. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A404185997/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bca5e9ad. Accessed 11 July 2024.
Imagine your most shameful fears about yourself. Now imagine sharing them with a writers room and then the world, packaged as a relationship comedy.
That's what Desiree Akhavan did with her debut TV show ''The Bisexual,'' which comes to Hulu on Friday. Akhavan plays Leila, an Iranian-American woman living in London who has been with her girlfriend and business partner Sadie (Maxine Peake) for 10 years. When Sadie proposes, Leila balks and moves out, finding herself with a new flatmate, Gabe (Brian Gleeson), and a desire to date men for the first time.
The series is a different kind of coming-out story, one that digs deep into the expectations surrounding female sexuality and the discomfort that can greet bisexuality from both gay and straight people. Akhavan, who co-wrote, directed and stars in the series, began working on it after doing press for ''Appropriate Behavior,'' her debut feature film, in 2014.
''I heard myself described as 'the bisexual' at every other introduction: 'the bisexual filmmaker,' 'the bisexual Iranian-American,' 'the bisexual Lena Dunham,''' she explained. ''For some reason, hearing that word made my stomach flip, in a non-fun way. And I wanted to explore that.''
A coproduction of Britain's Channel 4 and Hulu, the show's rawness will come as no surprise to viewers who know Akhavan's work from ''Appropriate Behavior,'' her role on the fourth season of HBO's ''Girls'' or ''The Miseducation of Cameron Post,'' the acclaimed film about a gay conversion camp that Akhavan directed and co-wrote, which was released in August.
During a recent trip to New York, the London-based Akhavan discussed why she knows the title will alienate some people, the importance of realistic sex scenes and what she hopes the #MeToo movement will achieve. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did you come to write a show about a New Yorker living in London?
I wrote the pilot when I was still living in New York. I pitched it to all the networks and it was rejected everywhere. Then I ended up moving to London and I pitched it on a whim to a couple of places in the UK and they all said yes. It turned out to be this backward way of getting an American distributor on board.
The show wrestles with charged dynamics found within the queer community. What was the experience of writing it?
Cathartic. Sometimes painful. I think it was about naming the worst fears about myself, in some moments, and in other moments the worst and the best of the people around me. There's stuff that I was really ashamed of when we were first talking about the show that I feel less shame about now.
Like I remember thinking well, what if I had fallen in love with a man? If I were hot in high school, if a man had seduced me, I never would have come out. I wouldn't have allowed myself to fall in love with a woman, because it was such a horror to my family. Not feeling gay enough, that's something I felt a lot of guilt over. I don't think that's true anymore, but that was something I needed to say in the script.
The show is composed of true stories from my and my collaborators' lives. They're heartfelt and very much mined for heightened dramatic purposes, but also with a real air of authenticity and the stuff that we're uncomfortable to say out loud.
Was that part of the thinking behind the title?
I think it will turn off a lot of viewers. I want to know why that is, and to stand by it: I know that I'm playing the long game and I want you to watch this thing and be like ''Oh, it's not what I thought it would be.''
[Read our review of ''The Miseducation of Cameron Post.'']
There's a lot of generational tension in the show, as when Leila says to Gabe's younger girlfriend that ''everyone under 25 thinks they're queer.''
They're not necessarily our opinions, we just want to bring these conversations to the surface. There is a different dynamic between having grown up with the internet and being queer being like being part of a cool club, and not growing up with the internet and having to fight for being openly gay. I'm not looking down on the younger experience of being queer, but I do think that there's a resentment there that we gloss over.
It feels like Gabe is grappling with toxic masculinity right up to the end of the show.
That's 100 percent what was happening. My hope for the show is that people stick with the six episodes, because I think he may come off as a stereotype at first and then the more you get to know him, you peel down the layers. He is really a love letter to my brother, who is my favorite person in the world, and on paper he's my worst nemesis. He's so disgusted by armpit hair on a woman, and I grew out my armpit hair to play Leila -- he was horrified. We really got into it on that one.
It felt almost radical to have such a stereotypical straight white man like Gabe --
In such a queer show? Yeah. I wanted that juxtaposition, because I still coexist with my brother and we are nothing alike. But we laugh the same.
I loved when Gabe randomly asks a table of lesbians what they thought of the notoriously explicit lesbian film ''Blue Is the Warmest Color,'' which is very male gaze-y and also had abusive conditions on-set, according to the stars. Straight people have asked me about that movie too, as apparently the only queer art they know. How important is it to have art about queer women made by women?
I think unrealistic depictions of sex and relationships are harmful. I was raised on them and the first time I had sex, I had learned everything from film and television and I was like ''Oh, this isn't at all like I saw on the screen.'' The more I have frank conversations about sex, the more I learn that all of us feel like something is wrong with us sexually. I'm so fascinated by this because it plagues me.
We punish the women in stories who have a sexual appetite, and I think there's a lot of fear around female pleasure. Because most people equate it with power, and there's a lot of discomfort with female power. I don't think this is the story of a slut -- this is a woman who's trying to allow herself to receive pleasure, and not lie and compromise about what that entails.
When you're creating work that is so raw and personal, how does it feel to get feedback and reviews?
It's really hard. This show is so frank and so unlike anything else out there, so I feel pretty naked. I recently learned to do something which makes it easier: When someone tweets something very mean or that feels like a real personal attack, if you look at what else they've written or championed, it will always be something you hate. Then you can calm down. You're like ''Fine, I don't want your love.''
What else are you working on?
I'm developing stuff, but I would really like a big job from a huge studio.
What's your dream project?
A Disney or Marvel movie. Winning an award at Sundance for ''Appropriate Behavior'' did nothing for my life, except it really gave me a sense of entitlement. I think most women don't have that innate sense of entitlement that most men are born with, especially when they work in male-dominated industries. I'm really grateful for that: My own feeling of ''I deserve the world.''
Has your thinking about projects or how you run sets changed since the #MeToo movement?
No, because I have always run a super female-heavy, super female-focused and really warm environment for makers. I know what it's like to feel uncomfortable on set and not just in sexual ways -- in the hierarchy of power that any industry with a lot of money and visibility will promote. That is something that will change along with the #MeToo movement. As large as sexual harassment is, this is larger than that -- it's about treating people with respect and dignity.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
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Stanford, Eleanor. "In 'The Bisexual,' Desiree Akhavan Grapples With All Kinds of Sexuality." New York Times, 15 Nov. 2018, p. NA(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A562203685/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bca6c592. Accessed 11 July 2024.
Akhavan, Desiree YOU'RE EMBARRASSING YOURSELF Random House (NonFiction None) $20.00 8, 13 ISBN: 9780399588501
A Sundance-winning filmmaker reveals how her "most cringe-inducing moments" have been integral in shaping her life.
The New York City-born daughter of Iranian immigrants, Akhavan always felt like a "different species." Her insecurities became even more pronounced during adolescence when classmates posted a picture of her on a joke website and labeled it "the Beast." Later, the author would reclaim the differences that set her apart from "skinny symmetrical white girls" (broad shoulders, Middle Eastern background, queerness) on a journey to adulthood that was both darkly comic and sometimes self-destructive. In college, Akhavan began cutting, and soon after, she underwent cosmetic surgery. "I don't think my nose job actually had that much to do with my nose," she writes. "I was reeling from my first broken heart and my parents wanted to support me, but since my heart had been broken by a girl, we had to pretend it wasn't happening." In 2005, Akhavan met Cecilia. Their professional collaboration helped the author find success as an independent filmmaker, while their friendship survived the "desperate need for validation" that she had battled for years. When Cecilia had a baby, Akhavan realized, "the truth that was too embarrassing to say out loud was that I'd never have considered making a decision without her, from what outfit to wear to what partner to choose, while she hadn't taken me into account when making the biggest decision of her life." Musing on the maturity that brought with it a desire for both children and "proximity to my heritage," she notes, sagely, "you're going to keep making a fool of yourself, because that's what it is to be alive." As she depicts her struggle to come to terms with a complex identity, Akhavan also celebrates the hard-won privilege of self-acceptance.
A readably funny and candid memoir.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Akhavan, Desiree: YOU'RE EMBARRASSING YOURSELF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797463123/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f4341803. Accessed 11 July 2024.
You're Embarrassing Yourself: Stories of Love, Lust, and Movies
Desiree Akhavan. Random House, $20 trade paper (208p) ISBN 978-0-399-58850-1
Actor and filmmaker Akhavan reflects on her heritage, her romantic disappointments, and her 1990s coming-of-age in this funny and incisive debut memoir-in-essays. The daughter of Iranian immigrants who sent Akhavan and her siblings to one of New York City's most exclusive private schools, Akhavan knew early on she was a "different species" from her peers. At 14, her classmates nicknamed her the Beast and included her on a list of the school's "ugliest girls," a designation that haunted her into adulthood ("I was the Beast for so long that even once I crawled my way to something different, I couldn't decide what I'd become without looking to strangers for answers"). The essays on Akhavan's failed relationships have their charms--espe-cially the one about her first heartbreak at a women's college in Massachusetts, which brilliantly balances humor and pathos--but she's at her most heartrending when she looks elsewhere, writing about her quest to feel at home in an immigrant community that struggles to accept her queerness, or cataloging how her best friend's motherhood impinges upon their relationship. By the moving final entry, in which Akhavan surprises herself by realizing that she, too, wants to become a mother, she's charted an endearingly crooked path to maturity. This is a winner. Agent: Kim With-erspoon, InkWell Management. (Aug.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"You're Embarrassing Yourself: Stories of Love, Lust, and Movies." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 24, 17 June 2024, p. 104. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A800405124/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7c566ddd. Accessed 11 July 2024.