Girl From The Hood

“Because of the way I looked, I never thought I’d be in a position to star in a movie. I always felt different. I felt really grotesque. People always looked at me and treated me differently because of the way I looked. It was really lonely. It really influenced me deeply. I’m very much a late bloomer, and the people I gravitate towards are late bloomers. I don’t always know how to communicate with people who grew up feeling good about themselves and feel entitled to be treated well. I always find the most compelling voices in the room are from those who had to earn their place, who constantly had to prove themselves.”

Akhavan sees Appropriate Behaviour as the culmination of a ten-year journey, beginning when she met her producer, Cecilia Frugiuele, while studying abroad in London. “She was the first person my own age who pursued a friendship with me and thought I was cool. That had never happened before; I’d always felt like I was trying to trick people to invite me to go places.”

Akhavan and Frugiuele made a student short together and stayed friends, and following positive UK press for Akhavan’s web series The Slope, Frugiuele sold her production company on making a feature. The Slope found Akhavan and Ingrid Jungermann as a pair of bitter queers talking shit on a Park Slope park bench, earning a cult following. Finding the experience “empowering”, Akhavan hoped to take the series’ fast-paced, no-budget “positive energy” to cinema, authoring a feature she could “shoot around [her] neighbourhood with friends.”

Feeling as if she’d never seen a successful “rom-com with LGBT themes,” Akhavan decided to “make the gay Annie Hall”. Appropriate Behaviour traces the history of a romance in twin timeframes and finds Akhavan as a Persian-American, bisexual Brooklynite struggling with romantic travails and shitty employment. It’s obviously close to home (“being bisexual, being Iranian, being a women filmmaker, these aren’t always things that have a lot of media visibility”), but not autobiographical. “I’m not wearing my heart on my sleeve or showing around an open wound,” Akhavan says. “These scenes didn’t take place, I’m not this character, and I pulled the other characters out my ass. My own life is not as compelling and convenient for an 84-minute narrative.”

Appropriate Behaviour screens 18 Sep, Event Cineams 8 
Part of the Queer Screen Film Festival
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