Synopsis

The Lost Requiem is a documentary film by Iranian filmmaker Khosrow Sinai About Polish refugees in Iran during the second world war.

According to some documents, the number of immigrants was about 300,000. Sinai used remnants of World War II to make the film, as well as talking to people who remember that period.

The Iranian government allowed it to be screened only once, but for the past few years it has been available on Youtube.



Cast: Anna Borkowska, Mitra Afkhami, Gholamreza Afkhami


The director interviews the local photographer Gholam Abdol Rahimi, who from the very beginning documented the arrival of the Poles to the port of Bandar-e Pahlavi. He recalls it like this:

“They were in bad shape, thin, ill and in rags… A friend of mine, a carpenter, used to make coffins for them. About 50 were dying every day.”

Rahimi’s photos are still not available. Instead of them, we try to illustrate the lives of the refugees with those of Nick Parrino, taken in the Polish refugee camp in Tehran.

In July 1941, the British and American allies persuaded Stalin to permit the deported Poles to fight on their side against the Germans. At that time, nearly half of the deported were still alive. They estimate between one and two hundred thousand the number of those who set out on foot on the terrible way from the camp to Persia before the arrival of the Siberian winter, or before Stalin changed his mind. Many of them died on the road or while crossing the Caspian Sea. The survivors who arrived in the port of Bandar-e Anzali – known as Pahlavi before the Islamic revolution of 1979 – were briefly quarantined, and then distributed among the Polish refugee camps of Tehran, Isfahan and Ahvaz. For those who died here from exhaustion, typhus or sometimes from the unusually good nutrition, the Polish government in exile purchased in March 1942 a part of the Armenian cemetery, the second largest Polish cemetery in today’s Iran.
(Source)