Zia Mohajerjasbi's 'Know Your Place' is a film that everyone in Seattle needs to see. by Charles Mudede Los Angeles/206 director Zia Mohajerjasbi's debut feature Know Your Place (released in 2022) is a film that everyone in Seattle (and all other major cities) must watch. It is dense, so unpacking it all is nothing but impossible within the obvious attentional limits imposed on a review. But, I will begin by saying this: The star of this film is, above all, Seattle. And not just Seattle, but the 206 in the months between summer and winter. This star has, during all months of the year, two important and different parts. One: The city that is becoming, class-wise, homogenous. This kind of city has less and less space for those whose lifestyle is maintained by the exchange of labor for wages. Two: The city that's losing its color. Black Americans were the first to go, and all that's left of what was once the Blackest neighborhood in the Pacific Northwest is the melancholy Remembrance Plaza, a public art project on 23rd and Yesler that the Catholic Community Services commissioned to ostensibly remember Black Americans who once called this area home.  For the past five or so years, however, it's been the displacement of Black Africans, with the recent closure of Queen Sheba Ethiopian Restaurant on Capitol Hill as its most striking (if not most depressing) example. There are now no East African restaurants or residents in what was once the most progressive area of Seattle. Next, it seems, are working-class Asian Americans in the International District. Know Your Place takes place during the present displacement.  The story of Know Your Place is profoundly Black African. It's the odyssey of 15-year-old Robel Haile (played by Joseph Smith), who is tasked with hauling by hand, from one end of the city to the other, a huge and heavy suitcase intended for a family friend who is returning to East Africa. I, as a Zimbabwean-born American, can attest to the authenticity of this plot. When an African returns home from the States, they not only take their own things, but those of relatives and friends, too. I once recall taking a long bus ride to Shoreline to give a Zimbabwean friend (Saki) a bag filled with vitamins for a sick family member in Harare. In the case of Robel, the suitcase he pulls around Seattle (on the sidewalk, onto this and that bus, into a Link train, or the trunk of a cab) contains, among other things, medicine.  But impressed on this Black African American plot, which also involves Robel’s best friend, Fahmi Tadesse, is the narrative sensibility of 1990s Iranian cinema—more specifically, the cinema of the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. And more specifically yet, Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's House?, which is the first part of a trilogy that ends with one of the greatest films of the 1990s, Through the Olive Trees. Where Mohajerjasbi, an Iranian American, parts with Kiarostami and the Iranian New Wave of the 1990s is Kiarostami’s commitment to beauty (or aesthetic realism). Indeed, a part of the sadness that courses through Know Your Place has as its source an unsaid consequence of the raw displacement of POCs by primarily wealthy white Americans: Not only can POCs not afford to live in the city, and, in many cases, the entire region, but, more importantly (and spiritually), they can't afford to live in a beautiful city. In the pre-gentrification days, one did not need a tech job or large inheritance to access the darkling light of Seattle, its large population of big and leafy-thick trees, its glorious sunsets, its glorious color-turning fall, its marvelous bodies of water, its nearby islands, and even the calming music of its urbanized rain. In this film, Mohajerjasbi presents something that is entirely new (if not revolutionary): A political economy of urban beauty. Know Your Place is screening at Northwest Film Forum Nov 14-21.