LAFF | Making a Feature in Kashmir: “Zero Bridge” Director Tariq Tapa

A scene from Tariq Tapa's "Zero Bridge." Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Restless teen Dilawar wants to escape his oppressive uncle Ali so badly that he steals passports and sells homework to old schoolmates to raise the necessary cash. When he meets Bani, one of his recent victims, by chance, however, he discovers that her own dreams of escape vanished with her passport. As he and Bani become closer, Dilawar’s plans start to unravel despite their shared determination to find a way out. [Description courtesy of LAFF]

“Zero Bridge”
Narrative Competition
Directed By: Tariq Tapa
Executive Producers: Tyler Brodie, Hunter Gray, Paul Mezey, Calvin Preece, Ed Branstetter
Producers: Hilal Ahmed Langoo, Josee Lajoie, Tariq Tapa
Screenwriter: Tariq Tapa
Cinematographer: Tariq Tapa
Editors: Josee Lajoie, Tariq Tapa
Cast: Mohamad Emran Tapa, Ali Luhammed Dar, Taniya Khan
Music: Niyaz Ah. Patloo, Abdul Hamid, Majid Ah. Malik, Zahoor Ahmad, Danish Ali-Rather, Shervin Motaharian
U.S.A., 2008, 96 mins

[EDITORS NOTE: This is part of a series of interviews, conducted via email, profiling International Spotlight and dramatic and documentary competition directors who have films screening at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival.]

What initially attracted you to filmmaking and how has that evolved since starting out?
 
A lot of my childhood in 1980s Manhattan was spent in my mother’s graphic design studio on Broadway across from the Flatiron building. She’d be designing logos at her drafting table and I’d be at my little drafting table at work on something: a puppet show, a comic, a story. I learned to read by her encouraging me to enunciate the ad copy and logos she would be hired to design, like when Nippon Video hired her to do box covers for their VHS release of vintage RKO “toons”—Felix, Popeye, Fleischer’s Superman. She also had some Pauline Kael books on the shelves and I just started reading them aloud. Those books and videos laying around her studio were how I first I fell in love with movies. We lived on East 4th Street between 1st and 2nd, and we went to movies all the time; a pretty wide diet, everything from “The Red Shoes” to “Dog Day Afternoon” to “Three Amigos!” to “Days and Nights in the Forest.” The Kael books were useful for tracking down titles to see either at MoMa, or on VHS at places like Kim’s. It was all the same to me; the cartoons and the Hollywood products and the arthouse classics. I still feel that way, actually. And I even still do my work not a desk but at a drafting table, interestingly enough.
 
When I was eight she also bought a  ½” Panasonic camcorder for her business, but I wound up monopolizing it to make probably a hundred meaningless short films for nearly ten years, with friends. I learned to edit between two VCRs. At that time in school, the closest thing to studying filmmaking was to become an English major, which I decided to be after reading Kurosawa’s autobiography, in which he recommends to all aspiring directors that you basically have to try to read all the great novels and plays in the world, because you really need to be a writer first, and you need to keep a log of your memories and impressions of things because creation is really memory. So, I was constantly writing stories and devouring between fourteen to fifteen movies a week for about fifteen years, and keeping a log of what I’d seen. I still do that too, actually! See how nobody ever really changes?

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I worked as a projectionist all through college in Houston, for an amazing film programmer who taught me a tremendous amount; I also spent some time in Paris at the Cinematheque. When I was twenty-three, I entered the graduate film program at CalArts, and was already thinking about synethesizing material for what would become ‘Zero Bridge.’   How did the idea for your film come about and what excited you to undertake the project?   I’d wanted to make a cycle of films in Kashmir for almost a decade. But it seemed impossible, so to keep the flame burning I did other things: for years, I kept a running file of short stories, drawings, short videos—basically a show bible—organized around panoramic themes of contemporary daily life in Srinagar City. Certain characters would reappear in each other’s stories. I kept them in various notebooks. The stories were loosely based on memories of my many times there visiting family, things I read in local papers, stories my dad would tell about his youth. I was just a magpie, really. And then when the time came to go shoot ten years later, I brought some of this material with me for inspiration. (Other stories I want to film in Kashmir, for this and for future films in the cycle, come from these short pieces.) Page 1 of 2 Next Login to recommend this article » posted on June 17, 2009 Films to Snag Login to Leave a Comment »