KHANEH SIAH AST

The House is Black is the only film for which Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967) was credited as director, with this new restoration functioning as a tribute to a unique humanistic talent thwarted by fate. Commissioned for the Society for Assistance to Lepers, Farrokhzad’s twenty-minute portrait of a leper colony in northern Iran fulfils its educational remit while transcending it at every turn, juxtaposing information about the condition and everyday scenes with Bible and Koran quotes, her own poetry and countless images of an equivalent, effortless lyricism: hands under weights and stricken faces, leaves in water and birds in the sky, laughter and great solemnity. (JL)