Also making a comeback in Know Your Place: Mohajerjasbi’s love for aerial shots of Seattle, its skyline peeking up from the fog, its little boxes on the hillside lighting up at dusk, its dark trees softening the built environment. But while many locals will recognize the skyline — perhaps aided by a cameo of the Central District’s Immaculate Conception Catholic Church — there aren’t many obvious “clues” to the movie’s location. In fact, the Space Needle (and the rain!) makes an appearance only at the end, a tiny beacon in a wide-angle shot.
Including the Space Needle would have been “the equivalent of casting an A-list actor in a small drama,” says Mohajerjasbi, a University of Washington alum. “You can’t get over the fact that you’re watching this famous actor do this really muted and grounded performance.” Instead, the aerial shots represent exactly what the characters see at each point in their odyssey. “We’re in Seattle, but we’re living it at the level of the neighborhood, or the street,” he says.
This has been Mohajerjasbi’s longtime approach (see also: his music videos for Gabriel Teodros and Macklemore, featuring skylines from a south end vantage point). “Like, we’ve seen the postcards, but here’s the Seattle that’s even more beautiful,” he says. “I’m hoping that I can communicate that feeling, and in the choice of images give you a sense of place. But from a [perspective] that folks that don’t live around Kerry Park are seeing — because that’s like, what, 10 degrees of a whole circle around our city? Kerry Park’s beautiful. But we’ve seen it.”
Instead, in Know Your Place, the city has room to breathe, now that the “A-list actor” isn’t sucking the air out of the room. The Seattle-ness is more subtle, embedded. It’s in the faces, in the languages (mostly English and Tigrinya), the Metro buses, the splendid colors of the foliage, the elusive, low sunlight and dramatic clouds of fall in the Northwest.
The nerve-racking question for Mohajerjasbi now is how his film will land with a Seattle audience. He’s also thinking about a national viewership, hoping for a wider film festival run and official distribution of some kind. That may be months or even years away, but he’s already at work on two new projects — one short and one feature film — with writing partner Christian Rabin. And guess what? Both are set in Seattle.
‘Know Your Place’ is streaming online from April 14-24 and screens in person at SIFF Cinema Egyptian on April 17 and at Ark Lodge Cinema on April 19.