Kalagh [The Crow] (Bahram Beyzaie, 1977)

From the new issue of Sight and Sound (September 2025), dedicated to "More Hidden Gems", here's my pick for a hidden gem that deserves to be restored and revived. – EK

It’s hard to think of a 1970s film as dazzlingly complex and as crammed with film historical references as Bahram Bayzaie’s tragically underseen Kalagh (The Crow). It takes Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie as a model but substitutes its psychosexual impulses with a philosophical inquiry into media, image, and memory. The film centres on a deaf educator who becomes obsessed with the picture of a missing woman. Her investigation interweaves past and present, and in undertaking it, she unearths a more sizeable lost identity: early 20th-century Tehran. The film is so dreamy that you might see it in your sleep before it one day returns to the screens. No easy sleep for me until then.

PS (December 29, 2025): I came across another blurb I had written about the film, this one for the MoMA season in October 2023.

The Raven is a first-rate psychological thriller showing writer-director Bahram Beyzaie at the peak of his creativity, a dense and modern puzzle of lost identities that eventually becomes a hymn to the old, prewar Tehran. Produced by Bahman Farmanara, whose films are also included in this series, the story centers on the search for a missing woman. A teacher (Bayzaie regular Parvaneh Massoumi) and a television producer become obsessed with the woman’s identity, their only clue a photograph in the “missing persons” section of the newspaper, and their Hitchcockian quest (with touches of Alain Resnais) offers a rich meditation on the role of modern media in our lives.

As you can see, I have not quite made up my mind about whether I should call the film Raven or Crow. In Persian, the word kalāgh can mean both, and there is no clear distinction between the two.