Alum Spotlight: ALEEM HOSSAIN
Aleem Hossain is an alum of our VR Action Lab (‘17) which was a collaboration between SWC, Google, and Harmony Labs. He is the writer/director of After We Leave, winner Best Feature Film at Sci Fi London 2019. Read more about him in the interview below. Go to www.aleemhossain.com to read about indie sci-fi and diversity in genre films.
SWC: Aleem, can you tell us about your early life and the time leading up to submitting to the VR Action Lab?
In my house growing up, the VCR was like the United Nations. My father is a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh, my mother is from a New England Roman Catholic family, and so I got to watch Bollywood and Spielberg and arthouse European cinema and late 90’s American indies. Seeing all the different things cinema could be, really impacted me. I moved to LA thinking that I would spend my life writing and directing films that somehow combined all these loves of my childhood. But that turned out to only be part of the story. After film school, I started on a path that culminated in me running around LA on nights and weekends making my first feature film: it’s a gritty partly-improvised drama that’s also science fiction. Around the same time, I put on a prototype of a VR headset and absolutely hated it. But I remembered how dismissive some people had been of digital cameras in the early days and I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t be like that when it was my turn to confront changing tech. I decided to throw myself into exploring AR/VR alongside cinema. A year or so later, I saw a twitter post about a collaboration between Screenwriters Colony, Google, and Harmony Labs to use VR to tackle pressing social issues and I immediately applied.
SWC: And tell us about your experience with the Lab.
My time in Nantucket was amazingly productive. We had a very fast timetable to deliver scripts for the VR projects that Google/Harmony wanted to make. SWC gave me the time to devote the attention this project deserved, my fellow writers and mentors helped fast-forward the revision process, and the feeling I had when I was there really reminded me how rare it is to get even a few weeks to solely immerse yourself in the creative life. I left SWC, on a practical level, ready to dive into a ridiculously fast production cycle on the VR project because I knew my script was ready. But in a more holistic way, I also left feeling creatively reenergized.
SWC: And then what? Can you tell us what’s happened with your life and career since then?
After SWC I completed the VR project and finished writing/directing my feature film. I’d learned that I still love cinema more than anything and that I was also really excited to explore new media. And then this job listing showed up in my email. I’d been teaching filmmaking as an adjunct for years but had never advanced to the final round of tenure-track professor job… largely because in LA, those jobs are often the retirement system for the previous generation of Hollywood. I was never going to compete with the resume of a guy nominated for an Oscar in 1982. But times were changing. Occidental College was looking for a narrative filmmaker who’d made a feature film and done work in emerging media. The fact that I could point to a completed VR project I’d done with Google and that I had worked on at SWC (which was a model for ideation that I could bring to a liberal arts college like Occidental) made a huge difference. I got the job and became the Professor of Digital Storytelling in the Media Arts and Culture Department at Oxy.
SWC: What’s been going on this past year?
The past year or so has been unbelievable. It feels like all these things suddenly exploded into the world but really they were all the culmination of the last decade of work. Much like those years applying to professor jobs and not getting them until I got a dream job… my film, After We Leave, got rejected by 22 festivals in a row... but then we got into Sci-Fi London and won Best Feature Film. I won Best Director at the Berlin Sci-Fi Film Fest and then Film Threat called my film “a shining example of indie filmmaking at its finest.” We got acquired by a distributor and After We Leave is getting a small theatrical release in LA and NY and global digital release on Apple and Amazon.
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