The House Is Black

The documentary was shot in a leper colony near Tabriz. The camera shows what the disease leaves on faces and hands without concealment, and at the same time records the school, a wedding, the teacher taking a class and children at play. Forugh Farrokhzad wrote, directed and edited her only film, reading some of the narration from her own poems and some from the Quran and the Torah. It runs a little over twenty minutes. It counts as the starting point of everything that followed in Iranian documentary and the new wave. After the shoot Farrokhzad adopted a child from the colony, and she was killed in a car accident a few years later. Who it is for: anyone curious about poetic documentary and the origins of Iranian cinema. Who it is not for: viewers who do not want to see the physical effects of the disease directly.