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It’s hard to think of a 1970s film as dazzlingly complex and as crammed with film historical references as Bahram Bayzaie’s tragically underseen Kalagh (The Crow).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.