Mustafa Toby Eck’s life came full circle as he sat conversing with other filmmakers at Yavapai College during the 29th Sedona International Film Festival a few weeks ago.

Eck grew up in Sedona and graduated from Sedona Red Rock High School in 2003, then enrolled at the Zaki Gordon Institute for Independent Filmmaking, which was located at Yavapai College between 2000 and 2011, where he studied documentary and narrative filmmaking for two years, honing his skills and developing his craft.

“They required you to take the camera in your hands immediately and start creating,” Eck said. “This was crucial. It was not about film theory — it was about teaching yourself how to make movies through experience, which is when you really learn to make movies.”

Eck’s mentors included Dan Gordon, ZGI’s co-founder, who was a screenwriter for “The Hurricane,” “Wyatt Earp” and “Passenger 57.” Gordon taught part-time at ZGI, which he had named for his son, an independent filmmaker killed in a car accident when he was 22.

“I’m still connected with Dan,” Eck said. “Not on a daily level, but you know, it’s hard. It’s very hard in the film industry to find a mentor or people that consistently open doors for you.”

Eck graduated from the University of Southern California with a bachelor’s degree in film and TV producing in 2013. He began working as a production assistant for Radical Media in Santa Monica, Calif., where he learned commercial production. A year and a half later, he decided to go to Egypt.

“I went to Egypt for like nine months to work on a documentary that I started, and then it got sidetracked by the Egyptian revolution in September of 2015. I started working freelance, got a job in Egypt working at this media company as a cameraman,” Eck said.

Ties to Egypt

“My mom has been in the U.S. now for almost 40 years, but she was born and raised in Egypt,” Eck said. “My dad is a full-blooded Swede from Montana. His grandparents were all Swedish immigrants.”

For the first decade of his life, Eck said that his family moved to a new city every year. “We did Halloween in Egypt and Ramadan in Santa Cruz, Calif,” Eck states on his website. “I came of age in a small tourist-trap town nestled between the metaphysical red rocks of Northern Arizona.

On my 10th birthday, my mom bought me a Polaroid camera. One camera begot another and soon all of my allowance was spent at the Walgreens photo department.”

Eck stated that one minute he was playing baseball in small-town America, and the next minute he was in the middle of Egypt riding on the back of a street train with all the other kids. He felt the dichotomy helped him to understand the artistry of filmmaking.

“I grew up in a small town. I understand what goes on in small towns and how people think and what their hopes and dreams are, what they deal with. It’s not all going to be related to Egypt or the Middle East,” Eck said.

Eck went on to travel the world with his family and remembered that his father always had a video camera in his hand to document all of their trips. Eventually, he wanted to do the filming himself.

“I think from that age, I was fascinated by video and images. It’s hard to sometimes compute or put your finger on it, but there was this fascination,” Eck said.

Eck believes that traveling at such a young age fed his curiosity about history and culture, which was already stimulated by living in two different worlds. He spent each summer in Egypt, which he thought of as “summer camp,” learning to speak Arabic and maintaining a connection to his ancestral society. Eck now describes himself as an “unofficial ambassador, divided between two different cultures.”

Heritage in Films

Encouraged by his SRRHS teachers, who knew about his heritage and passion for film, Eck devised a plan to explore western misconceptions about the Middle East for his senior-year exhibition.

“I moved from Saudi Arabia in June 2001, and then the World Trade Center was attacked,” Eck explained. “It was especially detrimental to me, because this was going to affect me in ways that many of the people in my school couldn’t really understand.”

Amid the rise of Islamic extremism in the Muslim world and Western intervention in the Middle East, Eck documented his travels to Egypt to investigate the root of anti-American sentiment in Muslim society. The film took over a decade to produce.

“Before moving to Sedona in 1994, my family and I moved back and forth from the western U.S. and Egypt and Saudi Arabia,” Eck said. “Since I was born, I’ve always gone back and forth, so this film is cathartic for me in that I get to deal with reconciling my heritage. And at times when they especially seem at odds — as far as the media and certain presidential candidates are concerned — it creates a lot of inner friction.”

Eck’s goal was to create a documentary that would be shown in high schools across the country. He wanted to screen the film during assemblies to discuss current events related to the Middle East and the Islamic world and to encourage young people to learn more about the region based on facts.

‘All at Once’

Eck is no stranger to the Sedona International Film Festival. He volunteered during the festival 20 years ago at the age of 18, and the following year, he screened his first film there. Since then, Eck has shown four films at SIFF.

Eck’s latest film, “All at Once,” a narrative short about a couple’s intercultural and interfaith parents meeting for the first time, was screened at this year’s festival.

“All at Once” is the story of a Palestinian immigrant father and his Americanized son.

“[The action] is set right before their future American in-laws — Midwestern Americans — come over for dinner for the first time and the father is trying to prepare this traditional Arabic dinner in a formal setting,” Eck explained. “His son is Americanized, and very nervous and apprehensive about seeming to be foreign or too much of an outsider. So, the film was [partly about] a battle between father and son over the menu, and what to include and what not. I would say it’s a love letter to Palestinian cuisine as well.”

Eck notes that he definitely embraces his heritage and feels that doing so is a lifelong journey. “I think you go through different chapters of that journey, and you sway one way or the other at different times,” Eck stated. “When you’re younger, you’re in school and I don’t think anybody wants to stick out. Nobody wants to be like an outlier. Everything is about conforming and that’s just like the social order, or at least that was the case for me anyways. It’s about fitting in and not being like a weirdo or being different from the crowd, right? At least that’s my sensibility.”

Eck explained that he was never ashamed of his heritage, but tried to ignore it at different times during his life.

“All at Once” is an amalgamation of his own experiences and those of his friends who had at least one immigrant parent, he noted. “You connect to things that are dear to you … I understand from my life experiences, what it means to be an immigrant; what it means to be a first-generation American. I also have the vantage point of knowing what it means to be of European descent in the United States and that culture and that kind of heritage,” Eck said.

Filmmaking at the J. Paul Getty Museum

Currently, Eck is a senior video producer at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. “I would go to the Getty Center on my off days, sometimes just hanging out. It’s such a pretty backdrop and I would walk through the galleries, kind of in a meditative zone,” Eck said. “I was like, wow, that would be a really great job [working here].”

Eck has been working with the museum for the last five years and has traveled to places beyond his imagination. Currently he is working on back-to-back productions that run the gamut from a film on Tim Walker, a prolific British fashion photographer and his fantastical worlds, to a French film about how accurate the colors of the irises in Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings were and why his colors shifted, to a Scottish film on poet William Blake’s etching technique and printing process.

“What’s really interesting about my job is I get to jump around through different times of history, different parts of art history,” Eck said. “We also have antiquities at the museum, and I worked on media for Mesopotamia and Assyria and ancient Persia. There’s a lot of little different things happening at once.”

While Eck circles the globe for the J. Paul Getty Museum, closer to home, he travels the film festival circuit. He is presently in Austin, Texas, screening “All at Once,” and is a finalist in two other film festivals. Eck says that he has been working in films for close to 20 years. It is both his calling and his life’s work.

“I’ve never had a job other than working in a restaurant when I was 17. But other than that, this is what I plan to do forever. That’s the goal,” he said.

For more information, visit MustafaTobyEck.com