A Simple Event + The House Is Black

یک اتفاق ساده Yek ettefaghe sadeh
A Simple Event
Sohrab Shahid Saless, Iran 1973, 80 min.

The premise sounds simple: a few days in the life of a young boy living by the Caspian Sea. Yet Sohrab Shahid Saless’s debut feature turns it into a tragedy which is whispered rather than shouted. Mysteriously quiet, the film’s characters are apparently devoid of any feeling, yet are still capable of making an enormous emotional impact on the audience. Saless made only one more film in Iran before moving to Germany where he continued to make films and never received the full recognition he deserved.

خانه سیاه است Khaneh siah ast
The House Is Black
Forough Farrokhzad, Iran 1962, 21 min.
German premiere of the digital restoration

The only film directed by the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad before her premature death at the age of 32 is often considered one of the greatest documentaries ever made. Set in a leper colony in northwest Iran, the film is a dialogue between the passions of the poet (Forough Farrokhzad) and the voice of reason (Ebrahim Golestan).

Restored by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and Ecran Noir productions, in collaboration with Ebrahim Golestan. Additional support was generously provided by Genoma Films and Mahrokh Eshaghian. Restoration work was carried out at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in 2019.

Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa is a filmmaker and a professor at the Cinema and Television Arts Department, School of Media Arts, Columbia College Chicago. She is a co-founder and since 1989 the artistic consultant of the annual Festival of Films from Iran. She has written extensively on Iranian cinema and has co-authored a book on Abbas Kiarostami with Jonathan Rosenbaum.