Light, Legacy, and the Lived Experience: A Conversation with DP Farhad Ahmed Dehlvi

In the world of contemporary independent cinema, few films capture the claustrophobic intimacy of a single night as effectively as Take Me Home.

While the narrative thrives on the chemistry between its leads, the film’s visual soul is crafted by cinematographer Farhad Ahmed Dehlvi.

His work on Take Me Home isn't just about lighting a car interior; it’s about mapping the emotional geography of two strangers in flux.

Today, we sat down with Farhad to discuss the technical challenges of "car cinema," his philosophy on naturalistic lighting, and how he uses the camera to bridge the gap between silence and dialogue.

Let's dive in.

NFS: Hi, Farhad! Could you please tell us how you first got involved with Liz Sargent's Take Me Home?

Farhad Ahmed Dehlvi: The project came to me from Producer Apoorva Charan, with whom I’ve worked previously. As a cinematographer reading new material, I’m always looking for points of resonance - echoes of my lived experience that allow me to build the images with a rooted, personal perspective. Reading the script for Take Me Home immediately made me feel like a member of the Sargent family - I saw parts of myself reflected not just in Anna, but in each of the characters. I immediately knew I wanted to be a part of telling this story!

NFS: The film has had a great deal of success thus far on the festival circuit. Could you please tell us what it has been like to share this film with audiences around the world?

FAD : I’m so proud of the work we’ve done on this film – it’s been incredibly gratifying to see it resonate with audiences at Sundance and Berlinale Film Festivals this year. The screenings, audience reactions, and conversations at the festivals have been an affirmation of the power of cinema - to show an audience the world through different eyes, to be immersed in someone else’s reality for two hours. A shared experience that I believe ultimately builds compassion, empathy, and a kinder worldview in increasingly divided times.

The film goes on to play at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York this June, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with the audience there!

'Take Me Home' Courtesy of Sundance

NFS: Please describe your overall creative vision for the film and its visual palette. How did that vision evolve over the course of production?

FAD : I wanted the cinematography to meet the characters with openness and to remain present and responsive as the story unfolded. The goal for Director Liz Sargent and me was to develop a visual language that was sincere and unadorned, one that reflected Anna and her family’s daily lives without imposing style for the sake of beauty alone.

We wanted to film with an improvisational approach, allowing scenes to evolve as the performances took shape. This meant staying light on our feet: shooting handheld and lighting with broad strokes for much of the film.

Working on location in small spaces, it was an ongoing game of chess to anticipate the actors’ flow and get the camera in the right position without interruption. In this way, the film is very much rooted in the heritage of filmmakers like the Dardenne brothers and Agnes Varda, as well as the contemporary voices of Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, and Chloe Zhao. We also took inspiration from the work of Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, and Gordon Parks in how they captured the essence of American daily life.

Wanting to situate the characters within their suburban, central Florida environment, we filmed with a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, using Panavision Primo lenses, which stood out for their versatility and restraint: the way they render skin texture, gently separate colors, and avoid distortion even at close distances. This allowed us to light with hard sunlight, to rack the iris as the shots moved from inside to out, and to capture the ever-changing Florida summer light.

Looking at the film now, I believe these choices gave the film its shape. They helped create an expressive yet grounded visual world, one that invites the audience in and allows for genuine connection, vulnerability, and emotional reckoning.

NFS: Because the film is largely set in a single location, how did you aim to achieve a sense of visual variety over the course of the film?

FAD: A good deal of our prep was spent on location, working through scenes with Liz and marking out portions of the house which could be an appropriate backdrop for particular moments in the story. We wanted the house to feel like a sanctuary – a familiar space that the family had constructed to keep Anna safe. As the film progresses, this sense of safety erodes, and we acknowledged this by changing our lighting approach - pushing more direct light from outside, allowing streetlights, car-lights, and other artificial sources to creep further into the house, casting ominous shadows and coloring a once-familiar space in strange hues.

'Take Me Home'Courtesy of Sundance

Once our gaffer, Andrew Ortoski, came on board, we did extensive light studies at the house to understand the movement of natural light through the course of the day. We didn’t want the light to hit Anna, Mom, or Dad directly; instead, we built our lighting plan so the lights would ‘miss’ them and instead bounce and scatter off various surfaces in the house. This became the foundation for our lighting approach, reflecting, diffusing, and filtering the light before it reached the characters.

When we first meet Anna, we see her through wide-angle lenses, with even her close-ups being shot on a 21 or a 27mm. We wanted a sense of immediate intimacy with her, to see her interaction with Mom, Dad, and the unique environment of the house. As the story progresses, we start to film her with increasingly longer lenses, and this changes the audience’s perspective in quite a visceral way. You start to feel her isolation, her dislocation in the house. When the camera moves with her, the longer focal lengths give the movement a more dissonant feeling, which furthers the unease as the story moves forward.

There is also a poetic voice in the photography of the house, for instance, when Anna discovers her mother in the armchair, or later when she is trying to navigate the kitchen alone. In these moments, the photography is more fragmented, like an echo, a memory, an altered perception of reality. To achieve this, we used a combination of lighting effects, including a theatrical ‘moving head’ light to create rippling water caustics, and a ‘Portrait Lens’ from Panavision, which distorts the edges of the frame and helps give a subjective perspective.

NFS: I understand you faced some unique technical challenges on this film. What were they, and how did you and your team overcome them?

FAD: From the earliest conversations in prep, Liz wanted our filmmaking process to adapt to Anna, not the other way around, and this filtered down to each creative, logistical, and technical decision we made. Location choice, scheduling, setting scenes at a particular time of day, down to technical choices in the lighting and equipment selection, were governed by how we could enable Anna to best tell her story.

We designed the lighting in such a way that the camera could move through the space with the actors, shooting almost 360 degrees without issue. This meant strategically placed lights, with the big units hidden with camouflage netting outside windows, and smaller lights either tucked behind furniture or being handheld just outside the frame. Andrew has a theatrical lighting background, so he operated our fixtures from a lighting console, often dimming and fading lights on the fly in response to the blocking and camera movement.

Even a decision as fundamental as lens choice was driven by the need to remain agile. In addition to having the appropriate look, the Panavision Primo lenses offered us predictable and reliable performance when pushed to their limits. They didn’t flare excessively and had consistent contrast and sharpness across T-stops – this allowed us to shoot into the light and rack the iris as scenes moved from interior to exterior. Their minimal distortion allowed us compositional freedom to place characters right on the edge of frame. We carried ‘Close Focus’ versions of our most used focal lengths, and these allowed the camera to move right up to the actors without needing diopters or a lens change.

As with most indie films, we were fighting a tight schedule and working in tiny spaces on location, but our biggest challenge was the weather. Filming in Central Florida in the summer meant lightning storms nearly every day. After being shut down by the storms for a few days in a row, the Gaffer, Key Grip, and I completely reworked the lighting plan for the family house and put up a completely new, smart light LED-based rig, which traded in our big HMI lights for smaller units that could be remote-controlled and powered off house power if needed. This was crucial to the success of the following weeks. Instead of shutting down the set when the weather turned, we could bring the crew to shelter and continue filming inside the house.

Farhad Ahmed Dehlvi.Courtesy of Sundance

NFS: What are the key differences between filming a tender drama like Take Me Homeand an action thriller like 2024's Prey?

FAD : Ha, funnily enough, the weather was a major challenge on that film as well! We filmed through an unusually cold and rainy winter, which made playing California for the Kalahari desert quite a task.

Each film brings its own challenges, be it technical, logistical, or creative, though with each new project, I realize that despite varied genres and subject matter, my work has a constant thread: I strive to tell human stories, stories that transcend culture, genre, and spectacle and move the audience in a deeper way. Prey is ultimately a human story about sacrifice and redemption that plays out against the backdrop of a survival thriller. While filming both Take Me Home and Prey , I was constantly searching through the lens for images that would continue to resonate long after the credits rolled, images of universal human connection.

NFS: Is there anything else you would like to add about Take Me Homeor any other upcoming credits?

FAD : The first time I read Take Me Home , I felt the urgent need to tell this story now; and what I’m perhaps most proud of is how we folded that urgency into our visual and aesthetic choices, embracing each challenge and setback, using them as a means to question our creative ideas about the film and to further distil the story down to its essence. Each location lost, weather delay, or technical issue ultimately made the film stronger.

At the moment, I’m working on two very exciting features, though unfortunately I can’t share much detail just yet. One is a social impact documentary, and the other is an immigrant drama that explores what lies at the heart of the American Dream. Hopefully more soon!