Filmmaker and music archivist Cyrus Moussavi on remembering that artists are people

You’ve worked across documentary, archival projects, and releasing music by overlooked artists. A lot of what you do involves helping other people’s work find its way into the world. How do you decide you’re the right person to help someone tell their story?

That’s always a challenge. Almost every project I’ve worked on has come together very organically. I’ve been introduced to someone through someone else, or we’ve run into each other and had a conversation. It’s very rare that I look something up and then go track someone down. It’s usually a series of human interactions that sort of accidentally arrives at a project, especially the more in-depth ones.

Often it’s not that I’m necessarily the best person to do the project. Sometimes I’m just the only person willing to do it, or the only one around with the time, resources, and energy to follow through. Each project is different, but there are projects where I’ve definitely said, “If there’s someone else who wants to do it, please go for it.”

For it to make sense, there has to be a personal connection. There are infinite projects out there. As I get older and a little more discerning, my requirement is that there has to be some kind of human connection. Even if we come from very different backgrounds, there has to be something underneath it. Some shared interest or way of seeing the world that goes beyond “this is cool music” or “this will be popular.”

I imagine that connection has to be rooted in trust.

Yes, for sure. On both sides. These are long relationships and they’re complicated. I mean, there’s money involved. Not huge amounts of course, but money complicates things. And more importantly, there’s someone’s name and legacy involved. Their reputation and how they’re seen in the world.

When a potential project first comes to you, what makes you comfortable enough to move forward with it?

It’s hard to speak generally because they’re all so different. There isn’t really a “go button.” One thing I like about the projects I work on is that there’s no formula and no checklist.

The film I’m finishing now started in 2018 with another project. We were in south Georgia shooting a short, I Snuck Off the Slave Ship, and my collaborator on the film, Lonnie Holley, introduced me to a 91-year-old gospel piano player named Brother Theotis Taylor. Brother Taylor appeared in the final scene of the film, and we invited him and his family out when it played at the Atlanta Film Festival. Brother Taylor’s music is truly extraordinary, some of the most beautiful I’ve ever heard. He told me about these reels of tape he’d recorded at home over the years, when the spirit would hit him. So I worked with his son, Hubert Taylor, an artist and archivist in his own right, to make an album of Brother Taylor’s home recordings, which we released on Mississippi in 2020. Only after that did Hubert and I begin working on a film together.

While we were making his dad’s album, Hubert would say, “I have some footage you should see,” and I kept saying, “Let’s make the album first.” When we finally released the record and I had a chance to see some of Hubert’s footage, I realized how special it is, what an eye and a vision he has. It was gradual. We got to know each other. And now, years later, we’re still learning as we wrap up this film together.

Some artists are established and already have a system for how they work. That can make things easier. But others have never been allowed into the art or music industry, or they have been burned over the years. In that case, it’s a learning process, and it can be complicated. You’re building something new together.

A big part of it for me is asking how the artist sees their own work. How do they want it presented? How do they understand it in the larger world? That often changes my understanding of the project.

When we worked with Emahoy Tsege-Mariam Gebru, the Ethiopian nun, composer, and pianist, I wanted to understand how she saw her music in the world. She wasn’t making music to be famous. It had a spiritual purpose. We were preparing to release a record of her singing, and there were real questions about that, because as a nun in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, she wasn’t really supposed to be releasing commercial recordings, and certainly not supposed to be singing on them.

So I wanted to ask her directly: What’s the purpose of this? Where does this sit? Because the musical landscape she understood as a 99-year-old nun living in Jerusalem is very different from my version of it, being in, like, a record shop in Brooklyn.

I went to Jerusalem to meet her and unfortunately she passed away the day before I arrived. It was heartbreaking, but my collaborator Thomas Feng and I ended up doing serious archival work amongst the papers and tapes she’d left behind. We were able to contribute during a difficult time for her family. In her notebooks, we saw that she had been following the response to the records. She was writing down YouTube comments from videos with millions of views. She was reflecting on how the music was being received. She knew it would help people. It was a beautiful thing to see.

I’d say the consistent thing through all of the projects I’ve worked on is that it starts with meeting and building trust, and it ends up with a new work circulating in the world. And that the relationship shifts the whole time. It’s time-consuming and emotionally consuming. But it’s also the reason to do it.

Film and music have both been extractive industries, especially when it comes to Black and brown artists. How do you think about avoiding that?

It’s something we think about constantly. On a basic level, if the numbers don’t add up, it’s not fair. We split royalties 50/50. On the film I’ve been working on, Hubert and I co-own the copyright 50/50, and we’ve built a collaborative process for working together.

In the reissue world, a lot of labels make their money by buying master rights. They control the publishing. They control the copyright. They license it to films, and the artist has no say and usually doesn’t get paid. To me, that’s another form of colonialism. It’s a small-time venture capital model.

We never buy masters. We license them. Our contracts make it clear that the artist owns the rights. And of course often artists don’t even technically own their rights anymore. The recordings have been bought and sold for decades. But we license from them anyway.

In a lot of cases, the paper trail is a mess. Especially with African music or Middle Eastern music where these tiny labels that originally released the music are sold and resold by larger companies. So we make deals directly with artists or their heirs. And the contract itself becomes a precedent they can use later to claim rights.

On the surface, projects can look similar. A record comes out, a film comes out. But you have to look behind it—the details involve real people. Who owns what? Who makes decisions?

Mostly it’s about coming back again and again to the question: why are we doing this? Who does it serve? Especially now. My family’s from Iran. Every day we’re worried about our relatives under bombardment there. When I’m sitting around listening to Greek music from the early 20th century, I have to ask myself why it matters in that larger context. If I can’t answer that, I don’t have much energy to continue.

These projects are small, but they add up. They create real relationships across countries and they shift the historical record a little bit just by existing.

What would you tell a young person who wants to do this kind of work?

There are no real rules for doing this kind of work, so you have to come up with your own code. Mississippi comes out of a DIY punk background, a pretty anarchist anti-capitalist model. There are no backers, no big academic institutions, and no traditional business plan. But we have this history of independent music and truly independent artists to lean on and learn from. We’re not the first ones to ask, “What if we put out music we care about in a way that’s fair and doesn’t buy into the traditional models around creating and selling music?” A lot of the artists we work with have been doing this in their own way for years. We learn from them.

When you’re starting out, no one’s really paying attention. You have a lot of room to experiment and try new things. That’s a type of freedom.

Another thing I’d say is you have to treat people like people. I get messages from young people who are like, “Hey I found this old guy who made great music nobody’s heard and I want to put it out.” I get it, it’s exciting, but I’m like, please remember that that’s a real person. Slow down.

One thing that makes me hopeful is seeing people in other countries doing this work themselves. It’s not someone flying in from New York to record something in Kenya anymore. It’s young people in Kenya starting labels, releasing amazing music. And that’s really exciting.

We’re working on a record based in East Sumba, a remote area in Indonesia, and collaborating with Yes No Wave, an amazing experimental and noise label in Jakarta. Indonesia is huge. If you lay it over Europe it stretches from the UK to Kazakhstan. The distance between Jakarta and East Sumba can feel as vast as New York to East Sumba. But still, there’s a cultural connection. The closer the work is to where it comes from, the better.

It’s not about preserving something in a museum for posterity. It’s about letting it circulate right now. We use a phrase from Mike Davis’ book City of Quartz: “Excavating the future.” You dig things up so they can move through the present. When they circulate, things happen that you can’t predict.

Another thing I’d say to someone who wants to do this is we live in a pretty sterile culture. You should be looking for anything that breaks that open.

How important is financial sustainability?

You have to really want to do this work. I wouldn’t tell someone to do it to make millions of dollars—but of course sustainability matters. I work with Adam Holofcener, an artist and lawyer in Baltimore who runs Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. He’s always telling artists: stay in the game. Don’t burn yourself out on the first project. Don’t take risks that knock you out permanently.

Mississippi has been around over 20 years. We’ve had ups and downs. Sometimes you get excited and want to release eight Ethiopian records at once. But you have to learn pacing.

We’re not trying to get rich. When you’re trying to get rich, that’s when you start burning people. But you also don’t want to say, “I’m doing this for the love of it, so you should too.” You want to be able to pay artists real money. This might be your passion project. But it’s not necessarily theirs! It’s someone else’s life.

What’s important to understand about working with real people in film?

Film is a lot more entangled than music. Even a small film involves many people: crew, producers, the people on camera.

With music, artists create in a black box to some degree and hand you the result. They control their stage presence. But when you introduce a camera from someone else’s perspective, it changes everything.

I’ve found musicians, even ones that are used to being very vulnerable in their art, can often struggle when a film camera shows up. Because the control shifts away from them. And for people who grew up very aware of their image and presentation, that can feel really intense.

Film takes longer. It’s more expensive. It’s more agonizing. But if it works, it feels magical.

What are you still learning?

I’m constantly blindsided by new realizations. I’ll think I’ve figured something out, and then it changes.

One of my favorite filmmakers, Frederick Wiseman, just passed away. He was making films into his nineties. I want to be making movies when I’m that old. I’m curious who that version of me will be. What his relationship to the world will look like.

I don’t know what I’m going to be learning at that point. But I know I want to stay in the game long enough to see.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Eric Steuer.