Forough Farrokhzad (Culture/History & Director)

Born: 1935, Tehran. Died: 1967, Tehran (Automobile accident).

More famed as a modernist poet, of iconoclastic and feminist tendencies, she also made her name as a filmmaker with the short documentary about a leper colony, The House is Black, made in 1962.

Before this she had made her first steps into the world of cinema by working with Ebrahim Golestan, whose 1958 documentary A Fire she edited. That documentary, with its Bronze Medal award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival represents the first Iranian film to win international acclaim. She then collaborated on more of Golestan's films. She and Golestan were in love and were rumoured to be having an affair (Golestan being married). She also wrote scripts and acted in a few films. All of this was perfect apprenticeship, but one should not get the idea that filmmaking was particularly important to her creative life. Her poetry remains what is regarded as her greatest achievement and is not diminished in the slightest if one removes her brief brush with cinema. Nor is there any evidence that she value cinema any more than her other non-poetry artistic endeavours, such as painting or travel writing.

The failure of her marriage (she was a 16-year-old bride who convinced her father to let her marry) and subsequent divorce leading to her having to leave behind her only son, were traumatic and guilt-inducing experiences which inspired her art. In a way she had to leave behind her husband and son (and her father, i.e. all three patriarchal symbols) in order to fully emancipate herself as an artist. Dabashi reads in her art a simultaneous fear and attraction to the guilt and shame that consumes her. He also suggests that her own status as social pariah (due to the scandals following her and her supposed promiscuity) is what intuitively led her to relate to the lepers in The House is Black, for they too were marked, literally, as social outcasts.

Dabashi writes: "I feel I have wasted my life," she once wrote in a letter to Golestan, "and know much less than I should at the age of twenty-seven." This was in 1962, by which time she had published three of her five volumes of poetry and made The House Is Black, The same sentiment is evident in her travelogue from her trip to Europe in 1956. Whatever great work of art she saw in Italy left her feeling far more humbled than inspired.

Her works of poetry include the collections:

• Captive (1955)
• The Wall (1956)
• Rebellio (1958)
• Another Birth (1964)
• Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (1967)