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Caveh Zahedi: I Am A Sex Addict

"I'm trying to document my life and make it into a work of art," says filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, who has already covered a family trip to Las Vegas in the feature I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994) and a year in his life with In the Bathtub of the World (2001). His latest take on the autobiographical essay is more re-creation than documentary. I Am a Sex Addict recounts his addiction to prostitutes when he was in his 20s, mostly when he was living in France, and how he got himself back on track by going to Sex Addicts Anonymous.

"I'm re-enacting, and narrating without pretending it's reality," he says from his home in San Francisco. "Its very Brechtian and very self-refleXive."

Although he has a little footage of himself from that era of his life - two decades ago now for the 42-year-old Yale graduate from Washington, D.C. - he's not using very much of it. Instead, he's shooting new footage mostly in San Francisco with his producing partner, Greg Watkins, and sometimes a skeletal crew. The actors are a mix of professionals and non-professionals, including one professional prostitute and one porn star.

In his direct conversational approach, he talks in the film about what it is that pulled him into this sex addiction and how it impacted three different relationships. It's a topic he has explored tangentially before, especially in his video diary In the Bathtub of the World, but he's using a new approach in I Am a Sex Addict, one with re-enactments that are supposed to be at once naturalistic and highly stylized, as well as true and dramatic at the same time.

The whole film is scripted and storyboarded, but Zahedi says it has been complicated to put together because there are 274 different scenes that involve close to 5,000 different cuts -- a mind-boggling number. He also keeps readjusting based on what's working and what's not. "In the past we've always been able to shoot a few weeks or a month, then we edit for a year. Here we're shooting for a day or two, then looking at stuff and often reshooting it. There's a lot of reshooting. It's hard to gauge what's working because it's so edit-dependent."

In between shooting and editing, Zahedi has managed to find time to make a short film about 9/11 entitled, The World Is a Classroom.The film is part of a feature length series of short films about 9/11 called Underground Zero which he and fellow San Francisco filmmaker and sometime collaborator Jay Rosenblatt curated. This package of diverse, moving, provocative, and introspective shorts has been featured at film festivals and theaters around the country and aired on cable in September of 2002.

Meanwhile, the choices he's making with I Am a Sex Addict center around when to show and when to tell, with the emphasis more on telling than showing. This is indicative of his long interest in monologue and storytelling traditions, and he points to Spalding Gray as a prime example and inspiration.

"I want to explore where that dramatic tradition breaks down," he says. "There's this whole other tradition that has to do with performance and delivery and not with dramatic imagery."

The root of this, Zahedi says, is performance art. He was particularly influenced by Sam Hsieh, a New York performance artist during the '70s who would do year-long pieces, like living in a cage for a year or punching a time clock every hour for a year.

"Art is always this other thing from life. But how do you make life into art and not this 'other thing'? And how do you make art into life?" he says. "There's always a dichotomy of being and doing, but my goal is to integrate them, to get the being and doing at the same time. I want to create this aesthetic agenda around daily living."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | The Human Animal | History | California | 2001