The predator

Director and co-writer of 28 minute film shot on S16mm with 35mm print, based on Tabrizian’s original idea. ‘The Predator’ combines popular and experimental visual vocabularies to explore the dilemma of an Islamic soldier doubting his convictions. It poses the philosophical question: is it more difficult to die for an ideal, or to live without one?
‘The Predator’ considers the current political and media hype about Islamic fundamentalists, their suicidal missions and the cultural construction of Islam as barbaric. It portrays an enigmatic character, a man with no expectations or ideals, serving an idealist Islamic system. It is loosely based on the assassination of two Iranian writers in Hyde Park (1996).
The film creates a fictional Islamic country. The actual cast come from different Islamic countries: Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Morocco. The intention here is to indicate how metaphorically, fundamentalism has created its own ‘state’, with English paradoxically as the only common language. The use of English language is an ironic commentary on this reality and on the notion of ‘authenticity’, challenging the widely accepted belief that a film or a nation cannot be ‘authentic’ unless they express themselves in their original language.

Women are absent from the film; a device used as a metaphor for the position of women in Islamic fundamentalism. Yet it is a woman’s photograph which keeps troubling the hit man, and it is a woman’s voice which disrupts the deadly silence at the crucial moment in the story.

The film highlights a process of experimentation with still and moving image in the work of Tabrizian, drawing on recurring themes of identities, nation, and transnationalism. It has generated interest across film and art /photographic circles, and its screenings are ongoing in film festivals. AHRC Innovation Awards £51,000.