Filmmaker Andy Sarjahani will tell you the world is no place for boxes. Growing up with his feet set in seemingly disparate cultural arenas—a rural Ozarks upbringing, an Iranian heritage—he’s long understood that lived experiences often flout prepackaged narratives. That desire to explore such narratives led the Russellville, Arkansas, native to leave the world of academia to tell stories about his home state, both as a cinematographer (notably, for the Oscar-nominated The Barber of Little Rock) and as a director of his own documentary work. He has since turned a nuanced spotlight on a range of topics related to his roots, including Iran’s women-led uprising (The Smallest Power), the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker (American Grail), and the construction of an industrial hog farm in the Buffalo National River’s watershed (Downstream People).
On September 16, Sarjahani’s Wild Hogs and Saffron, a documentary that explores the intersection of his Iranian and Arkansan identities through the lens of a wild hog hunt in rural Arkansas, makes its small-screen debut on PBS’s Independent Lens after hitting the film festival circuit.
How long did it take for you to realize that you wanted to tell Southern stories?
You learn pretty quickly that you’re most effective as a storyteller when you’re exploring areas that you have a real emotional connection to and life experience in. When you have that, you can really start to unpack the layers of nuance that you might not see if you were, you know, sort of parachute-storytelling, so to speak. It was pretty early on that I gravitated toward things that had affected me in some ways—or had affected people I know and people I care about—culturally, politically, environmentally, economically.
Has that been in your work since the beginning?
Downstream People was the first project out of leaving academia; the desire to navigate a story exceeded my fear of failure in an entirely new pursuit that was very foreign to me. I grew up with a deep appreciation for the Buffalo River, the creeks of Arkansas, and the Ozarks. And my education background was also in sustainable agriculture and food systems. I have a deep care for the people of rural Arkansas—rural communities in general—so for me, there was a lot of overlap.
It’s one thing to grow up in a place. But it’s another to come back to those places wearing the hat of a journalist or filmmaker. When you bring a camera in, how does that change your identity?
Just having a camera there brings a different level of awareness. But if I approach a story, it’s generally from a space of curiosity and trying to understand something I don’t feel like I have a solid grasp on. My intent is not to come in as an outsider. I don’t want people to feel like a subject. For me, it should feel collaborative. With Bubba [Samuels, Sarjahani’s childhood friend] in Wild Hogs and Saffron, he refers to it as “our film.” The film I’m making with my dad—which is an expansion of Wild Hogs and Saffron [titled Iranian Hillbilly]—my dad refers to it as “our film.” The people that were in Downstream People, they see it as their film. Dr. [Tomekia] White, who was in Black Ag—the film I did about the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff professor and the work she’s doing in Arkansas—she screens that for her students all the time. It’s important to me that there is a mutual sense of investment.
Many of the people who appear in your work—Bubba, for instance—don’t quite fit into the boxes in which mainstream documentary work tends to place rural Southerners. Why is it important to have these stories in front of national audiences?
If I am engaging with people from urban coastal areas, they really already have this sort of predefined box that the South or rural America is supposed to fit in. And I would argue that a lot of the work I do pushes back against that. Defining the South by its worst traits is no different than defining Iran by its worst traits. For me, the South is so much more nuanced than it’s given credit for. And rural communities are so much more nuanced than they’re given credit for. So, a lot of the work that I do is to unpack that nuance. And nuance doesn’t mean something’s all good, per se. It just means it’s complicated, like everything else in the world, and it doesn’t fit in the neat little box that folks want to fit it in.
You’ve spoken about your dual identities being rooted in both Iran and rural Arkansas. Has filmmaking—especially your personal work—led you to a different understanding of who you are?
Having a solid grasp on the layers that came before you gives—I don’t want to say, a greater sense of clarity, because in some ways it only fuels more curiosity. For me, it’s almost like bushwhacking. It’s understanding all these layers that shaped me up to this point. They don’t define me, but they inform who I am. What do I do with that? Where do I go from there? How does that impact my future curiosity?
