The House Is Black | Khaneh siah ast (1962)

Synopsis

In the fall of 1962, Farrokhzad and three colleagues from Golestan Films traveled to Tabriz and in twelve days filmed The House Is Black, a documentary on the leper colony there.

Forugh later expressed deep personal satisfaction with the project insofar as she had been able to gain the lepers' trust and become their friend while among them.

Actually, the experience proved to have lasting consequences since she shortly thereafter adopted a boy from his leper parents in the colony and took him to Tehran to live at her mother's house.



After Farrokhzad's death, the boy's father made public numerous letters she had written him in which she revealed maternal feelings toward her adopted son that she had been unable to express toward her own child, who was being raised by her ex-husband's family.

As for the significance of The House is Black, it had the effect of presenting Farrokhzad in a new light to some devotees of modernist literature and other intellectuals previously unconvinced of her seriousness or sincerity as an artist.

Hitherto imputing some sensationalism or deliberate attention-seeking to her poetry and life style, the talent and feeling that the film revealed changed their minds.



More importantly, Golestan, Chubak and others feel that the film unequivocally embodied Farrokhzad's view of contemporary Iranian society, a popular secular intellectual view in fact.

As Golstan, who supervised the film's editing, sees it, The House Is Black depicts a leprous society in which the people trust in God and see a cure for their condition through prayer, whereas only science and surgery can effect a cure. Without such treatment, the society leprosy will remain and increase. (Summary taken from the website of: https://www.www.forughfarrokhzad.org/)

Cast: Forugh Farrokhzad, Ebrahim Golestan, Hossein Mansouri

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