فیلمفارسی

The screening is followed by a talk with Ehsan Kohshbakht (online) and Hadi Alipanah, moderated by Afsun Moshiry

“The film stopped and someone said the cinema was on fire.” In 1979, Islamists set fire to the cinema Rex in Abadan, heralding it as a turning point in the Islamic revolution and the end of Iranian post-war cinema. 422 people died. Filmfarsi is a term for the popular Iranian low-budget films which came to an end with this event. They are hybrids of recycled and re-coded genre cinema, neither fully film, nor fully farsi. In his archaeology of VHS bootlegs, Eshan Khoshbakht embarks on a search for the collective subconscious of a “nation with a split personality” and digs up sediments of machismo and homoeroticism, “madonnas” and “whores”, class conflicts, love, sex and violence. (EK)