Released to coincide with his album of the same name, Riz Ahmed has collaborated with WeTransfer and S/W favourite Aneil Karia to create haunting 12-minute short The Long Goodbye. Painting an unsettling and unfortunately believable picture of a dystopian future, where a British South Asian family are violently rounded-up by a gun-toting gang, Ahmed describes the short as a piece about “being broken up with by the country they live in”.

“It feels clear to me that this does very much feel grounded in reality, the reality of people’s fears, the reality of where we’re at” Ahmed explains to Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff on the set of The Long Goodbye. “What we’ve seen today goes through my head every day. It goes through the heads of all of my loved ones every day, and the heads of all of my friends who find themselves in a similar position of being broken up with by the country they live in.”

A visceral experience, whilst The Long Goodbye is propelled by Ahmed’s physical presence on-screen and that incredible rap/monologue he delivers at the end, it’s also a testament to the immersive filmmaking style of Karia, that injects everything he makes with a sense of urgency and intensity.

Having first featured Karia on our site back in 2015, with his unshakable short BEAT, we’ve followed the director’s trajectory as he moved into television, working on shows Pure and Top Boy, before premiering his debut feature Surge at Sundance earlier this year.

A filmmaker with Indian roots, who “grew up in a bog-standard British town where I knew I wasn’t ‘British British.’”, Karia says it was “a privilege to come and make something about being who we are”.