Isaiah Seret
The Masses is delighted to welcome Isaiah Seret into our family. His ideas are incisive and original, his execution is meticulous, and we like hanging out with a director whose path to our editing studio has been more colorful and, yes, cinematic than most.
Seret’s music videos range across a broad aesthetic and technical spectrum — from the avant-garde minimalism of Hecuba’s The Magic (tipped this month by Kanye West), through the lo-fi of Devendra Banhart’s At The Hop, to the epic passion of Kisses Over Babylon, the single for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.
Perhaps it’s little wonder that he can switch styles and genres with such ease. Cultural wandering seems to run in his blood. His German grandfather sold 3-D photographs to tourists on the Miami Beach boardwalk; his parents left New York to live in Afghanistan, exporting fabrics and fashion back to arty hippies in Manhattan. Isaiah was born in Kabul, but the Serets left town when the Soviets invaded.
Landing in Santa Fe, Isaiah had his first short story optioned for film at the age of 14, then studied at Cal Arts for a year after high school, but quit after convincing his parents to invest his would-be education fund into his first film, a 60-minute feature about pot-heisting teens. In order to enrich his screenwriting and directing, he returned to school and studied philosophy, psychology and Asian studies.
His break in film production came when director Khyentse Norbu invited him to work on Travelers and Magicians. Executive produced by Jeremy Thomas (The Last Emperor), it was the first feature shot entirely in the kingdom of Bhutan. This was followed by a job as a producer of the featureMilarepa, also in India, and helped propel him to direct a dozen PSAs for the US Campaign for Burma, a nonprofit group leading the fight to free Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
Now living in LA, Isaiah has fallen in with group of musicians/creators whose aesthetic is defined not only by their sounds, but by their visual art and love of storytelling. In his previous Hecuba video, Suffering, mutual friends came together in a loving cut-up tribute to Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos, with Devendra Banhart in a cameo role as a pompadoured greaser mechanic.
In his ideal situation, Seret works tightly with the artist on all aspects of the film, from set design to costumes, down to character roles in the treatment. It’s the way he likes it, and a modus operandi he’s extending with fellow Masses member Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Seret and Ebert are in the process of writing and producing a dozen videos for songs from the band’s recent album Up From Below. When combined, the 12 videos will mesh into a feature-length narrative film. (The Masses’ Matt Amato is currently in post for 40 Day Dream, the album’s opening number.) The pair’s first finished installment, Kisses Over Babylon, is an absolutely captivating beginning, and features not only the band, but actors David Strathairn, Dermot Mulroney, Stephen Mendillio and Sandy Martin – making it clear Isaiah’s unique filmmaking style has gotten off to an auspicious and exciting start.
The same can be said for Isaiah’s arrival into the Masses, we’re thrilled to be traveling with him on his journey.