The House Is Black (1963)
February 4, 2025 1:47 AM - Subscribe
Influential, controversial poet Forugh Farrokhzad was called The 'Persian Sylvia Plath’. She was a modernist feminist and iconoclast who broke barriers of sex and society and who died in 1967 at the age of 32.
She only directed one 22-min. film, The house is black, and in 1963 it paved the wave for the “Iranian New Wave”. It’s a harrowing, relentless documentary shot at the real-life Bababaghi leper colony, and it combines 'Ugliness’ and 'Suffering’ with 'Gratitude’, like no other film I’ve ever seen. (Alain Resnais’s Night and fog’ notwithstanding). Powerful and very disturbing, you’ll be better off for seeing it. 10/10.
During the 12 days of shooting, she became attached to a boy from the colony, and later adopted him.
A Paris Review exploration of Forough Farrokhzad.
Sholeh Wolpé on Forugh Farrokhzad.
7.8 on IMDb.
4.3 on Letterboxd.
Forough Farrokhzad on The Blue before.
Available for free on Internet Archive.
She only directed one 22-min. film, The house is black, and in 1963 it paved the wave for the “Iranian New Wave”. It’s a harrowing, relentless documentary shot at the real-life Bababaghi leper colony, and it combines 'Ugliness’ and 'Suffering’ with 'Gratitude’, like no other film I’ve ever seen. (Alain Resnais’s Night and fog’ notwithstanding). Powerful and very disturbing, you’ll be better off for seeing it. 10/10.
During the 12 days of shooting, she became attached to a boy from the colony, and later adopted him.
A Paris Review exploration of Forough Farrokhzad.
Sholeh Wolpé on Forugh Farrokhzad.
7.8 on IMDb.
4.3 on Letterboxd.
Forough Farrokhzad on The Blue before.
Available for free on Internet Archive.
Also available on the Criterion Channel. Worth watching for sure.
I watched this just a year ago. It resonated with me perhaps a little differently. I lived in Bangladesh in my late teens and a friend suggested we take a trip to a little village he spent a lot of time in as a kid and that we'd be staying at a "sanitarium". The sanitarium actually turned out to be a leper colony / hospital. It was pretty eye opening to me then (as a Canadian kid with no experience with leprosy but had seen northern reserves so I understood what neglect looked like). It was a European funded hospital so it was much cleaner and better run then the one depicted in the film but the people afflicted were in similar straights. The suffering, as it is depicted in the film and from what I saw, was profound. But you could still see kindness towards each other and friendships formed despite it all.
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:34 PM on February 4 [2 favorites]
I watched this just a year ago. It resonated with me perhaps a little differently. I lived in Bangladesh in my late teens and a friend suggested we take a trip to a little village he spent a lot of time in as a kid and that we'd be staying at a "sanitarium". The sanitarium actually turned out to be a leper colony / hospital. It was pretty eye opening to me then (as a Canadian kid with no experience with leprosy but had seen northern reserves so I understood what neglect looked like). It was a European funded hospital so it was much cleaner and better run then the one depicted in the film but the people afflicted were in similar straights. The suffering, as it is depicted in the film and from what I saw, was profound. But you could still see kindness towards each other and friendships formed despite it all.
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:34 PM on February 4 [2 favorites]
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posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:33 AM on February 4