The actor stars in and co-wrote the Oscar-nominated live-action short film that mirrors some of the caustic experiences he and his friend shared as brown men in Britain.
Riz Ahmed may not be kidding when he claims that Aneil Karia — Ahmed’s co-writer and director of the Oscar-nominated“The Long Goodbye” — “hasn’t returned a single one of my text messages” since the awards announcement. The two are video chatting from separate London abodes and Karia seemingly has no defense. But then he is deep in pre-production on, presciently perhaps, the BBC-ViacomCBS series “The Gold.
“ ‘Flee’ is a story about home and belonging and so many universal, profound things that cut to the heart of the human experience,” he notes, a description applying equally to “The Long Goodbye.” He raves about Karia’s expertise, admitting he himself “didn’t understand how it would hang together, honestly, until Aneil showed me the edit. I trusted him, I know he’s a genius, but all the different things we were trying to do, I didn’t know if it would work.”