Second Take: Failed Fyre Festival scrutinized in competing Hulu and Netflix documentaries

This post was updated Jan. 24 at 12:36 p.m.

Fyre Festival was meant to be an escapist, immersive music festival in the Bahamas – instead, it turned into “Lord of the Flies” meets Instagram.

The failed music festival was such a compelling train wreck that both Hulu and Netflix released documentaries about it within days of each other. This begs a comparison between the two accounts. Hulu’s “Fyre Fraud” seeks to unravel the psyche of Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland, while Netflix’s “Fyre” offers a more sweeping overview of the festival and those involved in the process. The two ultimately serve as complementary narratives that should be watched together, each covering a distinct angle of the story.

Fyre Festival was organized in 2017 by McFarland and rapper Ja Rule to promote a booking app. It was marketed with promises of luxury and glamour, while countless Instagram influencers and models including Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber promoted the event. However, all the performers pulled out and guests were met with disastrous tents and prepackaged foods, a far cry from the villas and gourmet delicacies they were promised. Subsequently, as the lack of planning and fraudulent financial transactions were revealed, the organizers were hit with eight lawsuits, resulting in McFarland’s six-year prison sentence.

When retelling the story of Fyre Festival, both documentaries struggle with issues of credibility. “Fyre Fraud” paid McFarland for an exclusive interview, a thorny choice typically frowned upon in journalism – as well as an ethically questionable decision given all the money McFarland swindled. However, the payment does not seem to impact the narrative, as the filmmakers do not spare McFarland from criticism. On the other hand, “Fyre” was produced in partnership with Jerry Media and Matte Projects, two companies involved with the festival’s organization. The film takes a softer approach to questioning sources, seemingly allowing the companies to absolve themselves of wrongdoing. While neither aspect is disqualifying, both are important to bear in mind while watching the films.

“Fyre Fraud” was released Jan. 14 without any prior notice, just days before Netflix was set to release “Fyre” on Jan. 18. The first film follows McFarland’s story chronologically, exploring his past business endeavors – or scams, depending on how one views them – and detailing how they led him to Fyre Festival. The film’s editing is frenetic and stylistic in a way that injects the atmosphere of Fyre Festival into the screen, speeding up the editing and music as the clock counts down to the festival, forcing the audience to feel the claustrophobic tension as the deadline approaches.

McFarland’s interview for “Fyre Fraud” is notable for all that he fails to say. In the course of the interview, McFarland shifts from rehearsed, optimistic answers to uncomfortable silence and attempts to change the subject, exposing him as a grifter able to charm his way out of almost anything until his con got too big to manage.

 

The film is supplemented with interviews from former employees, festival attendees and experts in business, finance and psychology. The experts provide the most interesting point of view, characterizing McFarland’s actions as reckless at best and criminal at worst. In one of the more chilling moments, a psychologist concludes that McFarland pathologically lies and charms others to get what he wants.

Because “Fyre Fraud” is so focused on unraveling McFarland, the documentary generally ignores the larger human impact. While the film holds him accountable for his con, it barely touches on those hurt by the failure, like all of the local Bahamians who were working around the clock to try to put on the festival and were never paid. Instead, it mentions the cost as an afterthought in closing subtitles – a move that feels insincere in its brevity given the full and nuanced exploration of McFarland.

“Fyre,” on the other hand, does focus on the human cost. The film is primarily made up of interviews from guests and organization partners, such as the heads of the media companies tasked with promoting Fyre Festival. Additionally, the documentary devotes about a quarter of its running time to some of the local Bahamians who tried to help with the production of the festival and were ultimately left unpaid. The choice broadens the scope and helps ground the film in a much-needed pathos.

Both the interviews with the company officials and Bahamians offer compelling stories about the galling conditions of the planning process. A Bahamian restaurateur was forced to take out $50,000 of her own savings to pay some of the wages Fyre Festival owed her employees. This level of detail paints a more lurid picture of the festival itself, offering the audience a real sense of the measly attempt that went into planning and executing such a massive endeavor.

But the downside of “Fyre” is apparent. Because of the organizers’ involvement in the documentary, the film spares them from the same harsh criticism as “Fyre Fraud.” McFarland’s absence allows the companies to shift the blame from themselves and onto the mysterious bogeyman of an organizer. Essentially, they’re able to deny the role they played as enablers – a note that feels disingenuous in spite of the hard-hitting truth of the rest of the film.

Both “Fyre Fraud” and “Fyre” have their respective shortcomings, which is what makes the two good companions. Where one documentary falls short, the other documentary picks up the ball. Together, the two competing films offer a more comprehensive look at the structure of our culture – the way in which the importance of image and social media pervade, and the very real cost that is incurred in the process. When Fyre Festival happened, many took to social media to mock the privileged millennials conned out of thousands of dollars and stranded on a tropical island. However, the documentaries make clear that the issues at the heart of Fyre Festival reach the world in which we all live – they’re not limited to a remote island in the Bahamas.

Creative work of UCLA alumni to shine at 2019 Sundance Film Festival

This year’s Sundance Film Festival will feature the work of myriad artists and content creators, a few of whom were educated at UCLA. From music scores to documentary, the Daily Bruin examines the work of three alumni premiering at the festival.

Roger Suen: Vital Sounds

Roger Suen appreciates being an integral part of the filmmaking experience, he said, as he was in his latest project.

Suen composed the score to “Ms. Purple,” a film centered around the relationship between a distant brother and sister in Koreatown who reconnect when their father is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Having previously worked with director Justin Chon on “Gook,” which premiered at Sundance two years ago, Suen said he enjoyed being a part of the creation of “Ms. Purple” from the very start, rather than as a postproduction hire as many composers are.

“It was definitely a different approach this time, but it was great,” Suen said. “It felt like a really collaborative process.”

In the film, Suen said Chon wanted the actors to be playing the music Suen wrote, so it was vital he start working before production even began. He was given the script early on and was able to form deeper connections with the story and the characters, despite the process taking much longer. In an indie film like this one, the story is character-driven, and for “Ms. Purple,” that meant dealing with the fairly universal topic of parents and siblings, Suen said.

Relationships aside, the technicality of the film score was a simple one for Suen, who wrote most of the music sitting at a piano with paper and pencil. Suen said most of the real work of film scoring is one of emotional manipulation, using the music to change how people feel about a scene in a film. However, he also wants his work to be unknowingly appreciated.

“Hopefully, at the end of the day people aren’t realizing that they’re being led to feel a certain way,” Suen said.

James Egan: A Late Edition

For documentary producer James Egan, making “Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins” was a journey in itself.

The alumnus first got the idea of a documentary about the life of journalist Molly Ivins after seeing the play “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins,” which premiered at Westwood’s Geffen Playhouse in 2012. The play followed Ivins, a Texas-born political journalist who was known for her colorful and humorous commentary. Egan said his lack of awareness of such a pointed, witty figure led him to share her story with a wider audience.

“I was so amazed by this woman who I’d never heard of,” Egan said. “Everybody has to know about Molly Ivins.”

The documentary features famous news anchors such as Dan Rather and Rachel Maddow, as well as political activist and former president of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards, each of whom tell the camera how Ivins’ work influenced them. Most spoke highly of her candor and ability to motivate the average American to be a politically active citizen, usually by poking fun at whatever politician she determined wasn’t properly serving their constituents, Egan said.

The rest of the documentary is chock-full of old news clips from when Ivins would speak as a guest commentator on C-SPAN, CNN or other network news channels, Egan said. Though her public speaking had the weight of a clever stand-up routine, most of her commentary was delivered via columns in The Texas Observer, a nonpartisan political magazine that nevertheless indulged Ivins’ progressive liberal perspective.

“I felt like I was on a journey to learn about the importance of (Ivins),” Egan said. “Her approach to the polarity that we’re facing and the responsibility of citizenship was a message.”

In the six years it took to create the film, Egan said the sociopolitical climate shifted, bringing the film a new significance. In the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump and in a politically divided American public, Egan said Ivins’ message of democratic responsibility seems as important as ever. Ivins, who died of cancer in 2007, was a progressive critic of politicians regardless of party affiliation, and Egan said he wanted to convey that in the documentary.

“She made fun of everybody: left, right, Democrat, Republican. She just wanted the truth to get out there,” Egan said. “A vital part of democracy is courageous journalism.”

Garrett Bradley: Rediscovered Inspiration

Garrett Bradley graduated with her MFA in 2012. Not long after, archivists at the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art discovered an untitled silent film by Bahamian-American entertainer Bert Williams. The film would serve as Bradley’s inspiration for her Sundance 2019 short film “America.”

Bradley said the footage was fascinating to view because of the film’s socially progressive nature: It utilized an all-black cast and racially diverse production team. Not only that, but the portrayal of the characters on screen struck her as beautiful, she said.

“It was the first time I had ever seen, in such early footage, really clear-cut examples of joy between marginalized people,” Bradley said.

Bradley’s short is one of 12 she produced as a cinematic homage to the works of Williams. The films are all silent and in black and white, each identifying with a year from 1915 to 1926, representing either a person or moment in black history that has been shrouded in invisibility, Bradley said. She said she pushes back against the idea that black cinema has been part of a “wave,” but rather that it always was part of the continuous evolution of cinema. Her short reflects that idea, placing black characters front and center in the New Orleans of the 1910s and ’20s.

Starting in 1915 was a deliberate gesture, as it was the same year as the release of “The Birth of a Nation,” a film widely recognized for its technical prowess as well as its veneration of the Ku Klux Klan. Bradley claims the unfinished Williams film was dropped by its producers after the success of “Nation” because of its progressive nature. Bradley decided to use a white sheet, a known uniform of the Ku Klux Klan, as a symbol of progress in her film.

“We see a white sheet going from being a KKK uniform to more just a drab sheet that falls off a hanger, then floats through the air and is taken by the Buffalo soldiers,” Bradley said. “They turn it into a white flag.”

UC engaged in necessary fight for open access to research-based knowledge

Academic research is about the spread of knowledge. For publishing companies, it’s about how many more millions of dollars they can pad their profit margins with.

The University of California is in the midst of negotiating a new contract with academic publishing company Elsevier in the hopes of lowering unsustainable subscription costs, after their contract ended with the new year. The University also is pushing for a “publish-and-read” agreement, which would mean open access to UC research. Open-access articles allow for the academic research to be open to the public, as opposed to subscription models, which may be accessed only when large fees are paid.

While Elsevier has become particularly notorious for high subscription costs, the problem is with the industry as a whole.

Academic publishing has been monetized and is increasingly inaccessible. Subscription-based journals with research from public universities often are paid for by taxpayers, yet aren’t always available to the public. Publishing has become concentrated in a small number of journals that can control and set extremely high price points for the entire industry.

This puts academic journals and research faculty in a difficult situation. Exorbitant journal costs have brought on calls for open access to research. But as prestigious journals sometimes are the only way for researchers to publish their work, faculty are inadvertently being forced by publishing companies to choose between their research and the common good – undermining a necessary conversation about open access.

For authors to even publish their own research, they are forced to operate through journals that charge institutions huge sums of money to allow them to share their own work.

This is because the publishing industry operates mainly under two models, the subscription and hybrid models. The subscription model is as it sounds: You pay to access papers. The hybrid model is subscription-based, but allows for authors to pay large fees to make their research open-access.

The problem is that both subscription costs and the added costs to make research open-access are astronomically high. In the last year, the UC paid $1 million to make its research open-access, on top of the $10 million it already paid in subscription fees to the publisher.

This means publicly funded research isn’t public, and faculty are made responsible for whether their research is open-access.

Subscription-based publishing’s increasingly high costs make research inaccessible for researchers, as well as potential readers. It limits authors’ copyright over their own work, and keeps it from being seen. Elsevier’s profit margins of nearly 40 percent and academic publishing’s high fees for open access mean that rather than helping the author’s work be seen, the deals are simply lining publishing companies’ pockets.

An email sent out in early December to UCLA faculty urged them to look at other journal publishing options in the midst of the Elsevier negotiations. This request further complicated an already difficult relationship between authors and journals. After all, faculty still very much rely on these journals for their work. In a heavily research-based occupation, authors need these publishers to succeed.

John Villasenor, a visiting professor of law and professor of electrical engineering, public policy and management at UCLA, said it’s problematic when the UC asks faculty to sacrifice their own better interest in order to aid in its negotiations.

“For faculty members in fields in which the top journals are Elsevier journals, the UCLA administration’s call for an Elsevier boycott has created a misalignment of interests,” he said.

While the outcome of the negotiations may eventually be to the benefit of UC faculty, they are stuck in a difficult position as the UC fights with a journal they rely on to get research published.

In other words, professors are stuck between a rock and a hard place in the fight to fix an industry they are so deeply embedded in.

While the negotiations potentially could complicate academic publishing for the time being, they are nothing compared to the difficulty the industry already places on faculty. These journals are forcing authors into an increasingly difficult situation by making them reconcile inaccessible costs with the importance of open access. The UC’s negotiations, while complicated, are of greater benefit than detriment to faculty.

Ivy Anderson, associate executive director of the UC’s California Digital Library and co-chair of the UC’s Publisher Negotiation Task Force, said she hopes this negotiation will make a statement to the academic publishing industry as a whole.

“There is already a growing global movement to address the unsustainable costs and restrictive nature of subscription-based journal publications,” she said.

Jeff MacKie-Mason, UC Berkley’s university librarian and co-chair of the UC’s Publisher Negotiation Task Force, said the negotiations will both allow faculty to continue to publish with Elsevier and alleviate the cost of open access, which faculty currently are paying themselves.

“The way a ‘publish-and-read’ agreement makes that possible is that the UC libraries would redirect money saved on the subscription part of our contract to help faculty pay (costs) instead,” he said.

The importance of these negotiations is about more than a slightly higher cost with a single journal contract. The issue is with the privatization of the academic publishing industry – and with the academic elitism that makes publicly funded academic research available to only those who can afford it.

Financial aid office lacks consistency when it comes to helping students

When you have to handle financial aid for more than 45,000 students, something is bound to go wrong. For proof of that, look to UCLA’s financial aid office – a demonstration that you can’t trust anyone.

UCLA’s financial aid office shows how bureaucracy can hinder an organization’s mission. Instead of helping students navigate the difficult process of paying for college, the office puts up barriers where it hurts most: their pocketbooks.

Students depend heavily on the office, which is in charge of processing students’ FAFSA and California DREAM Act applications, to make sure they can attend UCLA. No matter their major, everyone understands the importance of financial aid and how reliant students are on those who work in the financial aid office.

Despite that, the help students get is underwhelming. Employees ask for unnecessary paperwork to disburse aid and take a long time to respond to students. The inconsistent information office employees provide confuses students and slows down the filing process. Students who call or visit the office to ask questions about financial aid often get different responses, leaving them with more questions than before.

This lack of proper communication ends up hurting students. These issues need to be dealt with in order for Bruins to be able to continue their higher education.

A big part of the financial aid office’s role is to answer students’ questions on demand. Brianne Compton, the financial aid office’s assistant director of compliance and training, said answers to students’ questions can vary depending on how the question is phrased.

“Oftentimes a student can divulge relevant information one time and not the other, which then changes our answers,” Compton said.

But even when students ask standard questions, the staff seem to be confused about what responses to provide. Compton said it’s up to students to keep their questions consistent, so employees can answer properly. But students should be able to rely on office employees to provide responses to simple questions, such as where to find an office.

Natalie Weber, a first-year chemistry/materials science student, said when asking about how to submit a scholarship check, the financial aid office’s staff sent her around different areas of the building because employees kept responding differently.

“I went to turn in a scholarship check and wasn’t sure what office to go to, so I asked employees, who each referred me to three different locations,” Weber said. “It was odd to me that the people in the department didn’t know what to do with a fairly basic problem.”

The office’s labyrinth of hurdles and complications leaves students confused and forces them to find their own solutions to problems. And while there is an online submission system where students can ask questions, there can be delays in getting a response.

Handling paperwork is, ironically, also a big struggle for the office. Students may submit paperwork early, but because of the financial aid office’s complicated system, students’ cases keep getting pushed week after week. Constant impossible requests and comments from the office can leave students perplexed and concerned about their financial statuses.

Brian Brown, document management supervisor for students with last names beginning with letters OMA to ZZZ, said office employees aim to process a student’s paperwork as soon as possible. But how fast that is varies based on completeness of the documents, the time of submission and the volume of paperwork the office is dealing with at the time.

But this process is often a guessing game for students.

Aleksander Berg, a second-year economics student, said his financial status has changed since he submitted his FAFSA for the 2018-2019 year, so he had to submit appeals to try to get more aid for the academic year.

“I requested (an) income appeal (Oct. 5), and they have asked for multiple documents since then to assist in the review of our case,” he said. “Last week, they asked for my mother’s 2018 tax returns, which don’t even exist yet. We are paying out of pocket right now.”

At this point, the real challenge isn’t getting into UCLA. It’s getting financial aid out of it.

Most students are asked to submit some kind of paperwork in order to prove they need financial aid. The paperwork requested of students online is based on an automatic system that requests information once a student submits their FAFSA or DREAM application, but the requests might not correlate to the paperwork asked of a student if they were to go to the office in person. If a student were provided wrong information online, their aid could be withheld.

UCLA’s financial aid office needs to have a more efficient system for processing students’ paperwork and answering their questions. Students need to be thorough when seeking financial information or navigating yearly document changes; that’s precisely why they rely on employees to help them. It’s not difficult to create a standard training system that ensures employees have accurate responses to questions students might have. And the office should have yearly trainings that keep employees up to date about current forms.

Instead of providing excuses as to why certain problems exist, financial aid employees should work to fix their system, because, unlike students, they are actually getting money for being at the office.

The Quad: Difficulty behind maintaining New Year’s resolutions, why they can fail

What do weight loss, healthy diets and fiscal responsibility all have in common? According to Inc., these are some of the most common resolutions people make at the start of every new year.

We cyclically embark on these journeys of self-improvement as we forgo our bad habits and attempt to live out healthier, more desirable lifestyles – but our journeys are often not linear.

Hengchen Dai, an assistant professor of management and organizations and behavioral decision making at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, said she attributes this pattern of self-initiated change to how we correlate the calendrical transition with personal proactivity.

“The transition point creates a separation between who we were in the past and who we will be in the future,” Dai said. “There is a mindset that things can change, that we can change.”

Despite this surge of confidence and proactivity come the new year, repeated surveys have shown that the commitment to our resolutions dwindles as time wears on. In fact, it’s common for resolutions to begin to hit a roadblock in the early months. Approximately 80 percent of people will drop their New Year’s resolutions by mid-February.

Popular resolutions that are taken up are often based on personal health. In a survey by YouGov, approximately 38 percent of participants cited eating healthier and exercising more as their aspirations for 2018. But this makes it even more discouraging to find out that most Americans are likely to drop their personal health and fitness resolutions 17 days into the new year, according to a social media survey conducted by Strava.

For many students, these statistics parallel their own susceptibility to new year’s resolutions left unfulfilled.

Catherine Ahmadi, a second-year political science student, set several new year’s resolutions for herself. Many were centered around personal health and fitness: eating better and exercising more regularly.

“My diet is getting better. But ‘gymtimidation’ is so real,” Ahmadi said. “Motivating myself, taking that first step and going to the gym that first time – there’s always a bit of anxiety.”

“Gymtimidation,” or the fear of going to the gym due to perceived pressures to match up to workout professionals, is a feeling that gym novices know all too well. Indeed, a survey conducted by gym equipment review platform Fitrated revealed 65 percent of women avoid the gym due to fear of being judged.

First-year molecular cell and developmental biology student Charlotte Ann Magaipo Suiza faced similar difficulties. For the new year, Suiza made the resolution to transition from omnivorism to vegetarianism – a dietary lifestyle that she found hard to commit to, growing up in a traditional Asian-American household in which most dishes featured some kind of animal product.

“UCLA has a lot of plant-based options, which make it easier,” Suiza said. “But it’s been a challenge, mentally. I find myself having lots of cheat days.”

There is an underlying reason to why personal health and fitness resolutions are often left unfulfilled, Dai said. These goals are often set without the potential obstacles – whether it be gymtimidation or meat cravings – in mind.

The course of Ahmadi and Suiza’s resolutions reflect a much larger issue with the new year tradition: self-efficacy. As defined in a study conducted by Columbia University, self-efficacy is an individual’s belief in their ability to achieve goals, and therefore how persistent we are in pursuing said goals.

So it makes sense that the higher the perceived self-efficacy, the more determined and driven people are in approaching challenges – New Year’s resolutions included. This opens the door to unchecked optimism; it’s common for optimism to guide us in the formation of our New Year’s resolutions, but it is in this same optimism that our resolutions can become overzealous, and, quite possibly, unattainable.

“When people are over-optimistic, there’s a tendency to not be well-prepared and set out a proper course of action,” Dai said. “And if they don’t see progress early on, they may give up.”

Ahmadi’s solution? Tackling her gymtimidation in an incremental manner.

“I’m thinking of signing up for fitness classes at the gym,” Ahmadi said. “It would be a more encouraging place for me to start off.”

As for Suiza, becoming a flexitarian, rather than vegetarian, is more approachable of a dietary change. Being plant-based but having the occasional opportunity to eat meat and other animal products is exactly the kind of leniency that she needs, Suiza said.

The prospect of the new year brings forth a wave of hope, but is often replaced with sentiments of defeat as New Year’s resolutions run their course. To counteract this, it’s important to remember that these resolutions are not restrictions, but rather destinations that require preparation.

“During the new year we have a renewed optimistic approach toward goals,” Dai said. “But we need to have a well-thought-out plan that takes into account any difficulties that may arise.”

Assistant professor of Italian wins prestigious publication award

When Andrea Moudarres developed his doctoral dissertation at Yale University, he did not expect that it would one day turn into an award-winning manuscript. Moudarres, an assistant professor of Italian at UCLA, was recently awarded the 21st annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies. He received the award for his manuscript “The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso.” The manuscript examines the question of hostility and how it arises from ideas about politics or religion. Moudarres began developing his manuscript from his Ph.D. dissertation in November 2008. He completed his Ph.D. in 2011 and his dissertation a few months earlier. However, when he started working at UCLA in 2012, he had to take some time away from his manuscript. “When I started teaching I couldn’t dedicate time to the book. My first few years (as a professor) I wasn’t working on the book,” Moudarres said. “After 2015 I was able to come back to the manuscript and revise it significantly.” While the manuscript itself is an original analysis of Renaissance poetry, Moudarres said it is about how political dynamics can lead to conflict at its core. “It’s been said a community can only exist from conflict. I disagree with that,” Moudarres said. “History is what produced enmity but it’s not a necessary condition for human existence.” Paula Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, which issues the award, said the process for selecting recipients is competitive. “The committee reads dozens of books for each prize, from the foremost scholars in their fields,” Krebs said. “We are the premier national organization for language and literary study, so receiving the Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies means that your work has stood out, to a committee of your peers, as the most significant publication in your field this year.” Moudarres is one of several UCLA professors who have received awards from MLA, including Yasemin Yildiz, an associate professor of German and comparative literature, and Lucia Re, a professor of Italian. “I’m happy about it but I consider myself lucky,” Moudarres said. “I don’t think there’s anything particular about my work that makes it better than what other people might have submitted.” Despite Moudarres’ modesty surrounding his achievement, his colleagues said they were not surprised by his win. Massimo Ciavolella, an Italian and comparative literature professor, said he thinks Moudarres is very deserving of the award. “It added to what I already knew that he’s an excellent scholar and excellent person to have in a department,” Ciavolella said. Ciavolella added that Moudarres is a collaborative, pleasant and polite person whom anyone would love to be around. He said colleagues and students in the department were elated to hear he won the award. Moudarres said he hopes his award promotes discussion on whether conflict is an internal or external creation. “The main, original thing about the book is the idea that all conflicts are internal,” he said. “That’s the theoretical approach that has never been used for a Renaissance epic.” Moudarres added he thinks his manuscript will not only benefit his career, but potentially also the Italian department as a whole. “I hope it draws attention to the kind of work that we do, both in premodern literature culture as well as modern culture. Students don’t delve into the scholars that professors do,” Moudarres said. “Hopefully it will help students draw them to the department.” After winning this award, Moudarres said he aims to apply for tenure. “I hope to learn about (whether I’ve received tenure) in the next few months,” Moudarres said. “Then I need a couple of weeks of vacation.” Ciavolella said he has no doubt this is only the beginning of Moudarres’ career. “The prize constitutes a trampoline for what will be a brilliant career,” he said. “I have no doubt at all that – as good as he is now – in a few years, he’ll be one of the best scholars … on Italian Renaissance studies.”