Under the pergola of his friend’s house on Bangs Street in Provincetown, filmmaker Ahmed Ibrahim sits hunched over his MacBook typing an email to his manager. Bo, a border collie-black Lab mix, paces between Ibrahim and a white picket fence.
“Let me finish,” Ibrahim says as the dog pushes a wet nose under his knee. “Then we’ll walk.”
Ibrahim is the go-to dogsitter for his friend, Emmy-winning actor Murray Bartlett. Bo and Bartlett both star in Ibrahim’s new short, A Chair for Her, along with Mozhan Navabi.
The 13-minute film premieres at the Provincetown International Film Festival on Friday, June 14. It follows the reunion of long-ago lovers Lameece and Vaughan. Vaughan (Bartlett), loosely based on Provincetown artist Mark Adams, is a National Park ranger whose life is interrupted by the arrival of Lameece (Navabi), the mother of the child they gave up for adoption years before.
In 2019, Ibrahim came to Provincetown for the summer, as he’s done on and off since 2003. This time, however, he never left.
“I was really overworked and just needed a break,” he says. This spring, Ibrahim was inspired to make a film here. Over four days in May, he and his scrappy production team shot the film in various locations in Provincetown and Truro.
The film is moody. Shots of quiet landscapes, crashing waves, and bucolic dune shacks punctuate tense scenes between Bartlett and Navabi, who deliver their lines with hesitation or raw force. Sometimes, they just sit in thick silence. Balancing all this is Bo and Bartlett’s easy dynamic — a man and his best friend.
Ibrahim’s previous films were in Arabic. He says he feels pressure from the industry to capitalize on his Egyptian background. But for this short he didn’t want to focus explicitly on identity.
“I could have written a story about an Iranian woman who meets a gay guy, and they have some sort of epiphany together, but I didn’t want to do that,” he says. “I don’t want to pigeonhole myself.”
Ibrahim was born in Cairo to a chemical engineer and a seamstress. His childhood, which he describes as full of chaos, prepared him for the twists and turns of being a filmmaker. “Egyptians are very dramatic, and so were my family and neighborhood,” he says. Being on the set of a television show or movie, he finds, isn’t so different. “Directing is about navigating the disorder,” he says.
Ibrahim’s path to filmmaking was unexpected. He initially pursued a career in law, with encouragement from his parents. At 23, he moved to New York and tended bar to make ends meet while studying for the LSAT. In his free time he wrote short stories.
One story, “Tayer,” was based on his experiences as an immigrant caught between his family’s expectations and his desire to make films. A friend of Ibrahim’s working at HBO helped him adapt the story into a short film. “I knew little about directing at the time, but I coproduced it, wrote it, and directed it,” he says.
Inspired, Ibrahim pursued a film degree at New York University, where he wrote and directed Noor, his acclaimed 2012 autobiographical short about a 13-year-old living in a working-class suburb of Cairo. Noor screened at more than 30 festivals and won the Best Arab Short at the Dubai International Film Festival.
After graduating, Ibrahim worked as a studio producer for Shirin Neshat, a renowned Iranian photographer and visual artist. “It was my first real art job,” he says. “I was living my American dream.” Neshat’s art challenged Ibrahim’s understanding of identity politics in his own work, he says. “I was already thinking about immigrants negotiating space in the host country through art. What does it mean to be an outsider, to have your work celebrated, and how does that affect your authenticity?”
Ibrahim worked for Neshat for a couple of years until he returned to Egypt to be with his family after his father’s death in 2014. A period of reflection followed. “There’s this sense of running a marathon in America to become somebody,” says Ibrahim. “Going to a good school, finding work. I felt like I didn’t know what I was running toward anymore.”
When he returned to New York, he landed a job as a technical adviser on Homeland, a Showtime series about a CIA agent seeking out terrorist cells, usually in the Middle East. “That was a huge learning experience for me, but also a frustrating one because I was the only Arab on set,” Ibrahim says. The oversimplified portrayal of minorities on Homeland reinforced his commitment to telling stories that don’t fall back on tired tropes to propel a plot.
It’s also what made him decide to work in TV. “They didn’t hire any Muslims to work on that show over eight years,” he says. “It made me feel like there’s a lack of ‘us’ in the business.” Since Homeland, Ibrahim has worked his way up the TV production ladder, landing his first directing jobs last year.
The 41-year-old filmmaker is on a roll. He was just in Chicago, where he directed an episode of Deli Boys, a new Hulu comedy series about Pakistani American brothers. His pitch and pilot script called “Accidental Villains” was just selected for the prestigious TorinoFilmLab. The show will follow two Egyptian asylum seekers as they become friends in the U.S. after the election of Donald Trump. For Ibrahim, telling stories that are both authentic and entertaining is what’s most important.
Local Cinema
The event: Premiere of A Chair for Her by Ahmed Ibrahim
The time: Friday, June 14, 4 p.m.
The place: The Art House, 214 Commercial St., Provincetown
The cost: $20 at provincetownfilm.org
