Note: In the days leading up to graduation, we are profiling a number of seniors whose interests and accomplishments exemplify the many talents that make up the Class of 2008. These students and their classmates are ready to make an impact that extends far beyond Uni High. For the first portrait in this series, see Maritza Mestre's profile of Eunice How.

Kumars Salehi is working toward a career in filmmaking. Gargoyle photo by Sindha Agha (click to enlarge)

KUMARS SALEHI WANTS to be a well-fed artist.

There’s no doubt that the senior is a passionate person, especially when it comes to film.

Yet during our conversation outside of the Siebel Center in the Midwest springtime’s occasional gloom and rain, he speaks with a blend of determination and realism that produces a startling effect of nonchalant intensity.

Salehi first fell in love with film after seeing the "Lord of the Rings" Trilogy when he was in the fifth grade.

“That movie just kind of changed my life,” he recalls. “Not because of what it was about, but because of how well it did it. And I saw what was possible with movies, and it just kind of hit me — you can’t see it, but it just hit me in my heart. It hit me here. I guess it took like a year or so before I realized that this is what I wanted to do.”

Not long after, in the summer of 2003, Salehi began his first work in filmmaking, although he started out in front of the camera.

“I answered a casting call for a movie that wanted a Middle Eastern-looking kid about my age,” he remembers. “So I auditioned, and I actually got it. I spent that summer working on this movie, ‘Crab Orchard.’ That was I think my first main experience with it, and I guess I just saw how cool it would be, even if you’re just doing it for fun. 'Cause nobody really subsists on that stuff, if you’re just doing low-budget filmmaking you know, in the middle of nowhere.”

Salehi’s first serious experience in work behind the camera came in the summer of 2007, when he attended a summer program put on by the New York Film Academy.

“It was definitely one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done,” he says, “just drastically different from any environment I’ve ever been in before. We stayed in dorms. There were international students, kids from China, London, Colombia, and then kids from all over the United States, although mostly from the more … cultured, let’s say … areas of our country. You know, California, the East Coast. It was great.”

NYFA participants wrote, directed, and edited their short films in six days.

“The day I filmed was the worst day of my life,” Salehi says. “It was awful. It rained twice. The camera got jacked up twice. I lost a couple scenes of really key footage. I got one of my camera people’s fingers in a shot and I didn’t have time or film enough to reshoot the scene. It sucked, it was terrible. And I was constantly questioning my own worth as, you know, what I wanted to be.”

Uncertainty about his future career was a new feeling for Salehi.

“I think at Uni it can sometimes lull you into this sense of comfort where you think, ‘Oh, I’m constantly being forced to do things that I’m not good at so I don’t really need to do them well,’ because your identity isn’t wrapped up in that,” he says. “But when you’re thrust into the position where you have to do something well because that’s what you want to do well, that can be really stressful.”

Looking back, though, Kumars agrees that the filmmaking process turned out well overall.

“That was like my trial of myself. To see how much I really wanted it. And when it was over I just thought, ‘Oh my god I never want to do that again, yet this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.’ But I just realized that that’s my first time. And even just reviewing the clips of what I had shot on the editing screen, I could say, ‘I did this, I shot this, I framed this exactly this way, and it looked beautiful.’ And I hate to sound cliché, but that makes it worth it. It makes it worth it to see that you’ve done something that … kicks ass.”

Being in an environment more conducive to filmmaking was an enlightening experience for Salehi.

“It was so enriching for me to be around all these people who want what I want and maybe see the world the way I do,” he says. “But it didn’t really matter because it’s just different being in an environment where what you want to do with your life isn’t viewed as an anomaly, or something like, ‘Oh, I wonder how long it will take him for him to realize that he’s not going to go anywhere with that,’ you know.”

Salehi has never let the naysayers stand in his way, though.

“I feel like if you really want to do something, you understand it in a way that a lot of people who maybe want to do something different, or who don’t really appreciate that medium which you want to go into, don't,” he says. “But it was refreshing to be around people who took that for granted, you know, like, ‘Of course, of course I want to do this.’ I guess it was just a glimpse into what I hope will be the environment of my future.”

Members of the Uni community had a chance to catch a glimpse of Salehi’s screenwriting at this year’s Student Productions, which included his play “Run to the Sun: A Concise Vignette,” about a man pondering life in his city while addicted to Sprite.

“That was originally going to be a short film that I never intended to make,” he says. “I thought, ‘Hey, why not just kind of like tweak it a little bit for the stage and send it to StudProd,’ because I did StudProd as an actor sophomore year and I loved it. And I thought that before I leave I might as well try and direct something. So I wrote it, and it got in. The final stage version was radically different from what I’d imagined it originally when I was writing it my sophomore year. It got generally good responses, though.”

Salehi's love of movies also translated into a four-year stint as a film critic for The News-Gazette's Spin-off youth page.

He capped off his high school career as co-editor of the Gargoyle's arts and entertainment section. On April 19, he won first place in review writing at the IHSA journalism sectional tournament at the University of Illinois, then a week later he was runner-up in the same category at the IHSA state tournament at Eastern Illinois University.

Last week, Salehi received one more award: He won first place in the fiction category of the 2008 Iris Chang & Peter Kolodziej Writing Contest, for a piece on actor Owen Wilson's suicide attempt and the effect it had on an imagined fan.

With these accomplishments in tow even before graduating high school, Salehi is bright about the future. He will attend the University of Illinois in the fall and will major in general studies and cinema studies.

He hopes to have a career in screenwriting but would be content in directing or other film production jobs, seeing as “you can’t really be picky.”

“I’m always writing,” Salehi says. “There are very few points where you could ask me if I’m working on something and the answer would be no. The way I want to come up is just write. Write until someone notices me, and then write some more until I impress somebody.”

And once he gets noticed?

“I don’t really know what kind of movies I’m going to be making,” he says. “I’m not gonna be like, ‘Oh, I’m only going to make movies with serious artistic meaning’ and stuff because, I mean, who knows? I’m sure everyone wants to do that. Everyone wants to make really great artsy movies, and very few people do. I think you can do a lot of great things with any type of cinema. I’m just going to keep my options open. And hopefully there will be more accomplishments to come.”