By Nazanine Nouri
The Barbican Centre, one of Europe’s most prominent multidisciplinary arts centers, is paying homage to Iranian cinema in February with a season of masterworks by trailblazers such as Abbas Kiarostami, Bahram Beyzai, Ebrahim Golestan and Forough Farrokhzad.
“Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave” will feature nine ground-breaking movies from the Iranian New Wave of the 1960s and 70s. It will run from Feb. 4 to 25. (Full descriptions of the movies and their directors are provided below.)
The Iranian New Wave — or Cinema-ye Motafavet — was a grassroots movement in Iranian documentary and fiction filmmaking which began as an artistic response to the rapid modernization of Iranian society in the 1960s and 70s. Produced by a small group of young, collaborative and mostly self-taught filmmakers, the films – which were set against the backdrop of the Shah’s reign – combined documentary realism with poetic allegory, and reflected the complex and often contradictory emotions toward modernization during that period.
“Almost always subversive, these films reveal the contradictions of Iranian life with haunting clarity,” said Ehsan Khoshbakht, the critic and film historian who curated the Barbican film season. “They not only capture the genesis of an Iranian cinematic revolution, but also foreshadow the social and political upheavals that culminated in the 1979 revolution.”
“Tragically, this same revolution would lead to the banning of many of these trailblazing films,” he added in a Barbican news release.
The season will open with a double bill on Feb. 4: the screening of two autobiographical coming-of-age tales by Abbas Kiarostami and Amir Naderi, produced by Kanoon, where the two shared an office.
Kiarostami is known for experimenting with the boundaries between reality and fiction throughout his four-decade career, and for inspiring many generations of directors after him. A regular at the Cannes Film Festival, he was the joint winner of the Palme d’Or (the festival’s top award) in 1997 for “The Taste of Cherry,” and in subsequent years at Cannes, served both on the jury of the main film festival, and as president of the jury of the Camera d’Or Award for first-time filmmakers in 2005.
As Khosbakht recalled – in a tribute to Kiarostami that was published by Kayhan Life after the filmmaker’s 2016 death — “no one has ever been able to represent the truth through the camera lens as well as Kiarostami has, either before or after the Revolution.”
Kiarostami (1940-2016) collaborated with Naderi (as co-writer) on his 1973 debut feature film “The Experience” [Tajrobeh], inspired by Naderi’s own early days in Tehran after moving there from southern Iran.
Naderi (born in 1946) was orphaned as a child and spent his formative years on the street, discovering cinema through a job working in a movie theater. He would make his own dialogue-free film “Waiting” [Entezar] (1974) a year later, shot in the old city of Bushehr in southern Iran, blending illusory images of his youth with documentary moments.
Waiting
Naderi then moved to New York in the 1990s where he has directed numerous feature films ever since. He was named a Rockefeller Film and Video Fellow in 1997 and has served as an artist in residence and instructor at Columbia University and New York’s School of Visual Arts, among others. His US films have premiered at the Venice, Cannes, and Tribeca Film Festivals, winning prestigious awards.
Other ground-breaking films presented in the Barbican season include:
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“Brick and Mirror” [Khesht o ayeneh] (1966) by Ebrahim Golestan – an exploration of fear and responsibility in the wake of the 1953 coup, through a Dostoyevskian tale of a Tehran cab driver’s search for the mother of an abandoned baby. The film is widely regarded as Iranian cinema’s first modern masterpiece;
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“Stranger and the Fog” [Gharibeh va meh] (1976) by Bahram Beyzaie – the tale of a mysterious stranger aboard a drifting boat arriving in an unnamed coastal village suspended in time, where he falls in love with a local widow;
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“Far From Home” [Dar Ghorbat] (1975) by Sohrab Shahid Saless – a meditation on social isolation, and glimpse into the life of a Turkish ‘guest worker’ (played by popular actor/director Parviz Sayyad) in West Berlin;
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The once-banned short documentary “The Crown Jewels of Iran” [Ganjineha-ye Gohar] (1965) – Ebrahim Golestan’s visually dazzling documentary, ostensibly a display of Iran’s crown jewels, but in fact a bold attack on the treachery of the Persian kings; and
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“Chess of the Wind” [Shatranj-e Baad] (1976) – Mohammad Reza Aslani’s debut feature, set during the rule of the Qajar dynasty and chronicling the fallout between heirs when a noble family’s matriarch passes away.
The season will end on Feb. 25 with two trailblazing films, among the very few to have been directed by women before the Islamic revolution:
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“The House is Black” [Khaneh siah ast] (1963), the first and last short film by the late modernist poet Forugh Farrokhzad – a profoundly empathetic portrait of a leper colony in northwest Iran, capturing the raw essence of what living with leprosy is like, and narrated by the poet’s own verses. (While at the colony, Farrokhzad adopted a young boy, Hossein Mansouri, who now lives in Germany and has translated her poetry into German); and
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“The Sealed Soil” [Khak-e sar beh Mohr] (1977) by Marva Nabili – the tale of a young woman resisting a forced marriage, caught between the traditional values of her small village and her own yearning for independence.
The following are biographies of filmmakers featured in the Barbican season:
Ebrahim Golestan (1922-2023) was one of the leading intellectuals and writers of 20th-century Iran and one of the pioneers of modern Iranian cinema. He established his own Golestan Studios, which became the most sophisticated center for filmmaking in Iran in 1959. A champion runner in his youth, he initially combined filmmaking with a highly successful career as a journalist (he was also an accomplished translator) and as a professional photographer, capturing some of the most lasting images of Iran in the 1950s, when Mohammad Mossadegh was Prime Minister.
In 1954, when a consortium of Western oil companies took over the Iranian oil industry, he was put in charge of making documentaries. After severing his ties with the consortium in 1959, he negotiated the purchase of the film equipment, and established Golestan Studios, supplying film clips and photographs to the Western media.
In 1958, Golestan began an intense love affair with the feminist poet Forugh Farrokhzad – the most celebrated love affair in all of modern Persian literature (he was married, she was divorced). The affair lasted until her death in a car accident in 1967. He produced her documentary “The House is Black” – now recognized as an important film of the Iranian new wave, and one of the nine titles being screened at the Barbican.
After her death, Golestan took up exile in the West Sussex village of Bolney in Britain, left his wife and two children in Iran, sold his film studio and made Britain his permanent home until his death at the age of 100. His daughter Lili became a translator and is the owner and artistic director of the Golestan Gallery in Tehran. His son Kaveh became a renowned photojournalist, and was tragically killed by a land mine while on assignment in Iraq with the BBC in 2003.
Bahram Beyzaie (born in 1938) is one of the leading figures of the Iranian New Wave movement. He helped revitalize Iran’s performing arts by incorporating Indo-Iranian mythology and traditional Iranian performing arts with modern theater and cinema. He headed the University of Tehran’s Theater Arts Department for many years. His book “Theater in Iran” [Namayesh dar Iran] (1965) is considered an authoritative history of Iranian stage performance. He left Iran in 2010 at the invitation of Stanford University, and has since been the Bita Daryabari Lecturer of Persian Studies, in particular Iranian theater and cinema.
Sohrab Shahid Saless (1944-1998) is considered a pioneer of the Iranian New Wave who won major international film awards in the early 1970s. After studying film in Vienna and Paris, he returned to Iran and made his first two feature films “A Simple Event” and “Still Life” – both set in Bandar-e Torkaman on the Caspian sea coast, and representing some of the country’s poorest communities. Both films were presented at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival in 1974, with “Still Life” receiving the Silver Bear award. That same year, he left Iran for Germany where he quickly began work on “Far From Home,” partly inspired by his experience as a young film student in 1962 in Vienna, where he had held unskilled jobs to support himself. The film would later be nominated for the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival (the festival’s highest prize) in 1975. Naderi would direct no less than 13 feature-length films before moving to Chicago in 1991, where he died in 1998.
Mohammad Reza Aslani (born in 1943) is an influential documentarian of the Iranian New Wave whose films explore Iran’s diverse culture and its history, philosophy, art and archaeology. His thriller/documentary “Chess of the Wind” was banned after its only screening at the Tehran International Film Festival in 1976, and disappeared for some 40 years until his son, by some miracle, found the negative in a flea market outside Tehran. The film was smuggled out of the country and restored by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation in 2020. It is widely recognized as a masterpiece of Iranian cinema.
Forugh Farrokhzad (1935 – 1967) is a legendary poet and the literary voice of Iranian women in the 20th century. Her avant-garde poems were both praised and criticized during her life, and she remains one of the most acclaimed and controversial literary figures of the 20th century.
Her independent life as a female intellectual in a male-dominated society made her a role model for generations of Iranian women. Yet she faced widespread condemnation for rebelling against the strictures of her homeland in her poetry and in her lifestyle, and for exploring her identity as a woman and as a lover in ways that shocked her contemporaries.
Born into an upper-middle-class family, she attended public schools through ninth grade and started writing poetry at age 14. At 16, she fell in love and married her older neighbor and distant relative, a civil servant and amateur writer with whom she had a son.
Farrokhzad continued writing poetry and published her first poem “Sin” [Gonah] in a literary magazine, Roshanfekr. Her powerful description of love-making made it controversial; the fact that she was describing her own love affair caused an even greater uproar and resulted in her divorce from her husband and separation from her child.
After attracting much attention and considerable disapproval as a divorcee poet in Tehran, conducting several short-lived relationships with men, and going on a nine-month trip to Europe, Farrokhzad met Ebrahim Golestan in 1958. At the time, she was looking for a job and was hired by Golestan to answer the phones in his Golestan Studio. Months later, they began their passionate love affair, which lasted until her premature death at the age of 32.
In one of her letters to him from London, believed to have been written a year before her death, she wrote: “Shahi [Golestan’s nickname], you’re the dearest thing I have in life. You’re the only one I can love…Shahi, I love you and I love you to an extent that I am terrified of what to do if you disappeared suddenly. I’ll become like an empty well.”
Marva Nabili (born in 1941) studied filmmaking in London and New York where she received her undergraduate and graduate degrees. She returned to Iran where she wrote and directed
“The Sealed Soil” – one of the very first feature films directed by an Iranian woman, and reclaimed in recent years as a feminist masterpiece. The film was shot in Iran, but edited in New York shortly before the revolution. It chronicles the life of an 18-year-old peasant woman in a poor village in southwest Iran whose persistent need for independence causes her family to wonder whether this is a case of demonic possession. They turn to an exorcist to free her from these undue thoughts and desires.
The film had a limited budget of $35,000 and as a result was originally shot in 16 millimeters. It premiered at the Berlinale forum in 1977, and has recently returned to the big screen after almost 50 years, thanks to digital restoration work by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
