The House Is Black

This documentary short, the only film made by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967), is one of the very first film essays and qualifies as a precursor to the Iranian New Wave. The House Is Black captures life in the Baba Baghi leper colony, a small village where the inhabitants live from day to day. They go to the market, eat, knit, smoke and play board games. Meanwhile, the children go to school. Some of them are visibly affected by the disease while others look healthy—for now, at least. Farrokhzad’s voice-over provides the images with poetic commentary in which she mixes texts from the Bible and the Koran with her own poetry. A succession of attentive black-and-white shots endows the deformities with their own beauty and melds together daily moments of pain, despair, warmth and joy into a profoundly human document. Farrokhzad’s goal was "to wipe out this ugliness and to relieve the victims."