The House is Black (Film)

1962. Dir: Forough Farrokhzad.
The scientiffic voiceovers were written and most probably narrated by Ebrahim Golestan, while Farrokhzad's narration is more 'poetic' and refers to biblical passages.

The film was commissioned, and partly produced, by a governmental agency responsible for curing lepers. However the filmmakers were allowed a largely free hand, and despite the scientific voiceover and leprosy-curing discourse in part of the narration, it is clearly possible to read in the film an underlying mood that is more poetic, personal and has nothing to do with leprosy in particular but more universal things instead.

Farrokhzad used a camera crew from Golestan Films, the company of Ebrahim Golestan, whose documentaries she had edited and helped to make. This had formed an apprenticeship to cinema for her, and hence she was at this stage ready to make her own project.
Shot in 12 days, at the Baba Daghi leper colony in Tabriz, north-west Iran.

Farrokhzad won the trust of the people at the colony and in fact adopted one of the boys after making the film.

Farrokhzad said of the film, that it is "about the life of the lepers and at the same time about life itself—an example of life in general. This is a picture of any sealed and closed society—a picture of being useless, isolated, insular, futile. Even healthy people living outside a leprosarium in the apparently healthy society may share these characteristics, without being afflicted with leprosy. There is no difference between a young man who aimlessly loiters in the streets and that leper in my film who keeps walking by the wall. This young man too has certain pains of which we are unaware."

Dabashi, making reference to the science-religion divide among other things, writes: "Farrokhzad used the leper colony as a metaphor for Iranian society and thus revealed the far more pervasive social leprosy of her time". But it must be remembered that this was the Shah's Iran, an ideologically different dictatorship than the later Islamic Republic. 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.



Reception:
It was strongly criticised and ridiculed in Iran, even subjected to some sexist attacks on Farrokhzad's claims to being a filmmaker, with some sectors openly attributing the film wholly to Golestan. This reaction could be partly the cause for her never returning to the experience of filmmaking, and instead concentrating on her primary love, writing poetry.
However at the 1963 International Oberhausen Short Film Festival, it had a much kinder reception and won the top prize.



References
Dabashi, M&M.