Cinema
The House Is Black
خانه سیاه است
Forough Farrokhzad · 1963
Synopsis
In the leper colony of Baba Baghi, near Tabriz, the camera follows the daily life of the patients: meals, prayer, children playing football and going to school, faces and hands marked by the disease. A woman looks at herself in a mirror. Over the images, a voice mingles verses from the Old Testament and the Quran with poems, and a teacher asks a child why one must thank God for having a father and a mother.
Context
The film was commissioned by the Leprosy Relief Society and produced by Ebrahim Golestan's studio; the author shot it in 1962, in twelve days, at the Baba Baghi institution, and herself speaks the commentary in it, made up of her poems and of biblical and Koranic quotations. Chris Marker compared it to Buñuel's Land Without Bread. It has also been read as a veiled critique of the Iranian society of its time, and it is held to be a precursor of the country's New Wave. A restored copy was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 2019.
Who it is for
A documentary of about twenty minutes, in Persian. It is necessary to know that the images of the disease are shown without detour, and that the commentary is akin to a poem.
Prizes and reception
Grand Prize for documentary at the Oberhausen festival in 1963; nineteenth in the 2014 ranking of the best documentaries by the magazine Sight & Sound.