[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
I first spotted Ramin Bahrani’s name last summer, when the strength of his feature debut Man Push Cart scored the filmmaker a rave from Variety and prime screening spots in festivals from Venice to Marrakech. The 30-year-old Bahrani had reputedly made a shoestring yet sterling New York film about a Pakistani immigrant whose daily grind as a pushcart vendor anchors him through a swirl of loss and lament.
Six months later, as Bahrani reestablished himself in the city, enjoyed another glimmering write-up in New York Magazine and prepared Man Push Cart for its Sundance bow, we finally managed to catch up. “In North America,” he said, outlining his film’s route to Park City, “You think about Sundance. And we had contacted (Sundance programming director) John Cooper with the hopes that he could see the film in Venice on the big screen with an audience, but he arrived just after our film had already shown. So we really just mailed the DVD, and that’s it. Most (feature) films in Sundance are world premieres, and we’re one of the very few films that is not. So we feel very lucky and honored that they selected us.”
Bahrani, a North Carolina native who moved to New York to study film theory at Columbia University, made a student film during a spell in Iran and a handful of shorts upon returning to New York. Man Push Cart came about after he got to know his actor, Ahmad Razvi, at a pastry shop in Brooklyn. One screenplay and a few screen tests later, Razvi was a leading man.
Working closely with cinematographer Michael Simmonds, Bahrani sought a visual style that estblished the city as both a setting and a character. I asked how he refined his conception of a New York aesthetic, and what it meant in relation to films that came before it “It’s the fact that it feels like the city in the film–not a backdrop,” Bahrani said. “That’s really important to us. Edison was putting the camera in New York 110 years ago, and in conceiving the screenplay, I really wanted to show things that nobody had seen before. In all that time, we had never seen a movie about a pushcart vendor, so we really wanted to show locations and characters and take on the city that had not been seen before.” That included taking cues from Taxi Driver (“the greatest New York film ever made,” in Bahrani’s estimation) and John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie–an L.A. film, but still. “We were especially looking for nighttime films; our film is about 85 percent at night,” he explained.
And though the 2006 event represents Bahrani’s first trip to Sundance, he says his previous festival experience has him feeling prepared–almost as if he is supporting his second film. He recalled his and Simmonds’s immunity to the nerves that nagged other local filmmakers at a recent Sundance orientation in midtown. He acknowledges that he would love to sell Man Push Cart in Park City (the film already has a March 22 release date in Paris), but is equally preoccupied with viewing other films and meeting potential creative collaborators from New York. Simmonds, Razvi and Cart‘s producers plan to join him.
“I’m kind of keeping my expectations minimal,” Bahrani said. “I’ve had the great pleasure to see the reaction to the film in various countires, so now I’m curious what an American audience is going to think.”

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