Arbaeen (Nasser Taghvai, 1970)

Arbaeen (Nasser Taghvai, 1970)

During the annual mourning ritual held on the 40th day after the martyrdom of the Shia Imam, Hossein, men in the southern city of Bushehr rhythmically strike their chests in time with the recited elegies. In this short documentary shot in colour (Mehrdad Fakhimi's work), director Nasser Taghvai uses the sounds of environment to create a rhythmic editing, in sync with the movements and solemn strikes of the bare-chested men. There are occasional digressions to symbolic cutaways – common in Iran New Wave – of people outside and even a pair of dead fishes washed ashore.

Cheshmeh [The Spring] (Arby Ovanessian, 1971)

A film of unravelled mysteries and repressed longings, in Cheshmeh the nonlinear narrative, moving freely in time, is set in a Muslim community but is centered around a Christian woman who is the love interest of two men and married to a third. The interwoven fates are destined to end in tragedy, but the film leaves what potentially comprises a tragedy off-frame. Despite its richness in Armenian details (which was the cultural heritage of its director Arby Ovanessian), the film shares a significant number of threads with the Iranian New Wave films, particularly in its sense of isolation and fear of strangers, but also sets the hypnotic, numbing pace that the works of some of Ovanessian's contemporaries were going to be known for. 

The Spat-on Messenger: Youssef Chahine in Conversation with Tom Luddy

Youssef Chahine

Bologna, June 2019. I spotted an Arab name on the badge of the hotel's night porter. When I asked, he turned out to be one—an Egyptian. I mentioned to him that Youssef Chahine's films would be playing in Bologna for the next few days. His face lit up. A floodgate of emotions, about Egypt, his past, and cinema opened, temporarily drowned him in nostalgia, passion and regret. He shared stories of Chahine, of his beloved Alexandria. He even cursed the extra who had forgotten to remove his wristwatch during the battle scene of Salah Eddin (a film about the Crusade, from the Arabs' point of view). According to him, by doing so he had prevented the film from entering the Oscar competition.

Very few directors can make that impact on their people, endowing them with a sense of pride and identity. Chahine's generosity with emotions is contagious. In reaction to a Chahine film, it is as legit to dance or holler as it is to write an essay. In Bologna the scholar and musician Amal Guermazi decided to sing, as her introduction to Al Ard.

Sometimes effortlessly Ophulsian (especially in the '70s, in the fluidity of his carousel-like narratives) and sometimes dialectically Chaplinesque, Chahine brought together the seemingly irreconcilable worlds existing in 20th-century Egypt and gave them a sense of harmony. There was a wise calmness about him. He had every reason to be angry, but instead he gave a sad smile which became the Chahine cinema.

Aligned with Pan-Arabic sentiments, he looked beyond Egypt, too. However, his Algeria-set Djamilah (1958) is nearly impossible to see in a cinema. Telling the story of the Algerian Independence War fighter Djamila Bouhired, it has been absent from recent Chahine retrospectives. It's an anti-French film, in exactly the same manner that hundreds of western films, including some French ones, have been anti-Arab. But it's more than just tit-for-tat—it is a celebration of change in the Arab world, done in the best of Hollywood traditions which Chahine adored. Find the film and show it!  (For the Chahine tribute at Il Cinema Ritrovato, we tracked down a print in Albania but the subtitles were so big, covering almost half the screen, in the process turning them into Godardian onscreen statements.)

Abbas Kiarostami’s Early Shorts and Features: Poetic Solutions to Philosophical Problems

Abbas Kiarostami in Homework

An essay written for the Criterion release of Abbas Kiarostami’s Early Shorts and Features Blu-ray set. – EK

Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema is one of journeys. His films travel meandering routes, and his own path to international fame and recognition as one of cinema’s greatest directors was likewise mysteriously understated and subtle, almost imperceptible: a journey with marvelous detours.

Across a career marked by restlessness, which saw him making films not only in Iran but in France, Uganda, Italy, and Japan, the tireless filmmaker repeatedly reset his rules, moved from analog to digital, and transitioned from narrative film to video installations. Even as he came to be celebrated worldwide for beloved films such as Close-up (1990) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), whenever the conventional definitions of cinema became too limiting for him, he pursued creativity elsewhere. He rewrote classic Persian poems and published them in books of sparse, haikulike verses that resemble images, and he took strikingly abstract photographs of solitary trees in snow that feel like distilled poetry. His life was proof that a filmmaker could create singular images even without a movie camera.

CONTINUE READING ON THE CRITERION WEBSITE

The Deep Blue Sea (Anatole Litvak, 1955)

Italian poster for The Deep Blue Sea

The Deep Blue Sea plays at Closeup Cinema in London on December 28, 2025 from a rare 16mm print. – EK

THE DEEP BLUE SEA

This rarest of all Anatole Litvak films is about Hester, a middle-aged woman whose suicide attempt at the beginning of the story sparks off two flashbacks, one from the point of view of the upper-class husband she has abandoned and the other from the view of the younger, capricious ex-RAF pilot for whom she has left her husband. Back to the present, the film revolves around her desperate attempt to win back her lover, only to realise she is yearning for something she can’t have.

The Footage Found Me – Reflections on Celluloid Underground

My written introduction to the screening of Celluloid Underground at UnArchive Found Footage Fest in Rome, read out by Alina Marazzi. – EK

* * *

This is a film about an underground film collector, Ahmad Jorghanian. He was my friend. But I didn’t know how to tell his story. I tried ten years ago – and I failed. I abandoned the project altogether until, five years ago, I began having recurrent nightmares. They helped me get back on track and try to make the film again.

When you have one layer of a story and don’t know how to deal with it – don’t deal with it; Just add another layer. I ended up adding layer after layer: there is Ahmad; there is me on the screen, which I can’t bear; there is the history of film culture in Iran from two different angles – pre- and post-revolutionary; there is the story of the banned movie star Fardin; there is the history of film formats, from 35mm to digital; the story is also told through movie posters, in which I am The Son of Dr. Jekyll; and there is the story of an East London neighbourhood where Hitchcock was born.

The film was shot over the course of 25 years, in many different formats. I was in the business of creating an imaginary map of the world – of people and things I liked – without any immediate plans to turn them into a film. Among the things I like, and that made this film, are: Omar Khayyam, John Berger, coffee, Shahla Riahi (the first woman to direct a film in Iran), jazz, Luigi Comencini, trees, the recently murdered filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui, trains, Enrico Ghezzi, walks, Ebrahim Golestan, more trees, Chris Marker, Ana Mariscal. Some of the lines in the film are stolen from them. When you hear “the chaos of memories,” that’s not me. That’s Walter Benjamin.

Till We Meet Again (Frank Borzage, 1944)

Catalogue note (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025) on the restored version of Till We Meet Again (Frank Borzage, 1944). — EK

Ray Milland’s John, a grounded American pilot in Nazi-occupied France, is helped by a young nun (Barbara Britton) who, in order to facilitate his escape, dresses as a civilian. In doing so, the two develop an unspoken desire for each other.

Rouben Mamoulian in/on Mexico

Mamoulian (third from right) on the set of The Gay Desperado, a major hit when I played the film at Morelia International Film Festival in October 2025

Catalogue note for the Imaginary Mexico section of Morelia International Film Festival. — EK

It was not only Mexico that Rouben Mamoulian’s imagination transformed into a cinematic feast over the course of his illustrious career. Born in Tbilisi to an Armenian family, this classic Hollywood master used cinema as both a painter’s canvas and a musical score to reimagine cultures, countries, and cities—including those he knew well and had lived in. Thus, through a series of films now considered canonical classics, Soviet Moscow, Victorian London, and Imperial Sweden were rendered in unexpected colours, where life often unfolds with a lyrical, almost musical, rhythm.

Three of Mamoulian’s films have connections to Mexico: The Gay Desperado (1936) is set in Mexico but was actually shot in Arizona. The Mark of Zorro (1940) takes place in Alta California, filmed in Southern California. Blood and Sand (1941) is set in Spain, but was partially shot in Mexico. Even if these portrayals stem from the familiarly ahistorical blend of Hispanic culture, Hollywood glitter, and Mexican imagery, they nevertheless brim with joy and visual splendour, flourishing within their imaginary and impossible terrains.

Jazz In Exile – Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe & Cecil Taylor à Paris

Jazz on Screen at the Barbican, Cinema 1, Sun 16 Nov 2025

Jazz In Exile – Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe & Cecil Taylor à Paris + Intro by Ehsan Khoshbakht

This double bill offers two distinct portraits of ground-breaking American jazz musicians living and working in Europe, each navigating cultural displacement in their own unique way.

Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe (1967) offers a lyrical, offstage portrait of a legendary saxophonist in Amsterdam. Ben Webster cooks, films his own life and reflects on the blues. In the film, his music and spirit explored through poetic visuals and intimate moments.

Cecil Taylor à Paris (1968) is a fierce, fast-cut portrait of an avant-garde pianist in Paris, rejecting the European canon and rooting his explosive sound in the Black American experience. The filmmaking mirrors the music’s energy, becoming a bold improvisation of its own.

Together, they reveal what it meant to be a Black jazz artist abroad, displaced not just by geography, but by culture, politics and sound.

Jazz on a Summer's Day (Bert Stern, 1959)

Review of the Blu-ray release for Sight & Sound, March-April 2023. – EK

Jazz on a Summer's Day

The annual Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island received its only movie treatment thanks to Bert Stern, a photographer famous for his portraits of female stars and models – which should explain the film's fascination with fashion and the idea of the "cool". Here the attitude of the performer – the magnificent detachment of Thelonious Monk, the movie-star glamour of Anita O'Day – is as important as the sound. Equally instrumental in the direction (though, to his dismay, uncredited) and responsible for editing the film was Aram Avakian, who constructs the rapport between the performers and the festival audience, both captured at graceful ease.