A Castle with Red Walls
A documentary about a forever banned Iranian filmmaker both before and after 1979

Shahrvand Newspaper


The only Iranian filmmaker who was able to take his camera inside Tehran's red-light district, or the castle, and make a film there despite all the strict rules against it. He died on October 2019 and didn't manage to see any one of his more than 100 banned films released and shown publicly.

A documentary movie about a veteran Iranian filmmaker, whose works (more than 100 movies) have been banned and never released neither before nor after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

"Davood was a documentary filmmaker who made the feature film Dust Dwellers (1978). He died two or three weeks ago. Just as his name was forgotten at this ceremony, fewer than 20 people attended his funeral. Few people have seen his films, but his life story is an epic."  --Houshang Golmakani

He also made a documentary about Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali (a judge of the islamic revolution court who executed thousands of the opponents of the Islamic regime in Iran).


"A Castle with Red Walls"


Davood Roostayi or Davoud Roustaei, was a pioneer of Iranian documentary cinema and one of the first Iranian filmmakers whose works were screened at the Berlin and Locarno Film Festivals.

He has more than 70 documentary and fiction films from before and after the 1979 revolution, none of which have been licensed for release, but confiscated, such as his feature film Dust Dwellers (Ghobar neshinha, 1978).

Due to his avoidance of publicity, apart from the first generation of Iranian filmmakers, few people know him today. The documentary "A Castle with Red Walls" by Abbas Raziji is the only film about him and his unseen works.

While a student, Roostayi made Baba Bozorg (Grandfather) as his film thesis, with Khosrow Sinai as his mentor. Roostayi and Sohrab Shahid Sales had worked with Khosrow Sinai as assistant directors on his 1968 film "Beyond the Clamour" (Ansoo-ye hayahoo), that was about deaf teenagers and the methods of educating them at the Gardener's School.

The documentaries Ayatollah Khalkhali, Abyaneh, a collection of rural documentaries from all over Iran in 26 parts, Ma Mard-e Jangim, Our Iran, Caviar, the short film Baba Bozorg, Ziarat, and a half-finished war film are among Roostayi's never released documentaries, parts of which we can see in "A Castle with Red Walls".

He had been battling cancer for a year. He had become very weak, and finally, he passed away on October 2019 in absolute solitude. There was a silence around and about him, and even in the media, his death was not widely reported. Only Houshang Golmakani mentioned his death at a ceremony, "Davood was a documentary filmmaker who made the feature film Dust Dwellers. He died two or three weeks ago. Just as his name was forgotten at this ceremony, fewer than 20 people attended his funeral. Few people have seen his films, but his life story is nonetheless an epic."

--Source: Shahrvand Newspaper


"A Castle with Red Walls" (2019)

Cast:  Davood Roostayi, Ezzatollah Ramazanifar

Directed & produced by: Abbas Raziji
Cinematography by: Mansour Abderezaei
Editing by: Samira Gholamzadeh, Majid Mohammaddoust