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| The Carriage Driver (Nosrat Karimi, 1971), shot by Houshang Baharlou (Chess of the Wind) |
The forthcoming edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 25-July 3, 2022) doesn't include an individual strand for Iranian cinema, however, it'll nonetheless feature at least five dazzling Iranian films, made between 1961 and 2022, shown across 3 different strands.
The documentary section will see the Italian premiere of À vendredi, Robinson (Mitra Farahani, 2022), a dialogue between Ebrahim Golestan, a giant of Iranian cinema and literature (now only a few months shy of his 100th birthday) and Swiss-French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. This is a truly beautiful work and should prepare you for what comes next.
A Fire (Yek Atash) by Ebrahim Golestan was premiered at Venice Film Festival in 1961. We screened it in 2016 when a retrospective was dedicated to Golestan's cinema of poetry and politics. Now we have updated the faded 35mm print previously shown with a 4K restoration of the film, presented for the first time in its original Persian voice-over, spoken by a famous voice artist, Asadollah Peyman. (The 2016 screening was from an English-dubbed version.)
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| A Fire, restored by Cineteca di Bologna |
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| A Fire, a frame from the element used for Persian soundtrack |
A Fire is about the same situation shown in Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness (Lektionen in Finsternis) – putting out oil-well fire. However, Golestan's work has many advantages in comparison: Golestan develops a folkloric narrative, a celebration of collective work by ordinary people, while Herzog gives us an operatic tale of individualism; Golestan looks at the situation from the inside, whereas Herzog looks at from above; Golestan is not interested in the steely will of men but offers an anecdotal, poetic depiction of the lives interweaved with the disaster. Furthermore, Herzog didn't have Forough Farrokhzad to edit his film.
After Golestan, Il Cinema Ritrovato's exploration of Iranian New (a project started in 2015) continues with two major films.
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| Jamsheed Mashayekhi (left) and Arman in The Spring |
From 1971, a vintage print of Arby Ovanessian's The Spring (Cheshmeh) will be shown. With the screening of this film, Il Cinema Ritrovato makes an important addition to the chapter it began in 2017, in discovering the cinema of Iranian-Armenians. If the works of Samuel Khachikian, the subject of a tribute in 2017, were curiously devoid of specifically Armenian elements, this only feature film by Ovanessian fully embraces its cultural roots, magically blending them with Iranian traditions.
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| The Iranian-German co-production Far From Home |
One of the most remarkable masterpieces of this year is Far From Home (Dar Ghorbat), by Sohrab Shahid Saless, made in 1975 in Germany. Telling a story about Turkish migrant workers, this was before Saless eventually settled in Germany for good, so it marks the end of his Iranian career and remains one of his greatest achievements. A 4K restoration of this will be premiered, a film which so far was seen only in ghastly, reddish 35mm or even worse than that, dark and faded 16mm prints.
Finally, a recent 5K scan of The Carriage Driver (Doroshkechi), a rarely seen classic of Iranian cinema standing half-way between the New Wave and the Iranian popular cinema, serving both brilliantly and unforgettably, is in the works. This director and actor Nosrat Karimi's debut about "marriage Iranian style", which amounts to a "Commedia all'iraniana", is a major rediscovery. Made in 1971, it exemplifies a popular yet finely crafted type of Iranian cinema, access to which has been banned since the 1979 revolution.
The schedule:
June 26
The Spring | 21:30
June 28
See You Friday, Robinson | 16:30 | Introduction by Mitra Farahani
June 29
Far From Home | 16:30 | Introduction by Vivien Kristin Buchhorn
The Carriage Driver | 21:30
July 1
Far From Home | 9:00
The Carriage Driver | 10:45 | Introduction by Babak Karimi
The Spring | 14:30 | Introduction by Arby Ovanessian
A Fire | 16:00 | Introduction by Ehsan Khoshbakht
See You Friday, Robinson | 17:45
Hi Ehsan,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great post. I'd love to take part in the event on July 1 and watch all the movies. Do you you have more info on how general public can buy the tickets?