Documentary
Iranian (خانه سیاه است)
1963 · Directed by Forugh Farrokhzad · 21 min
A twenty-minute film made inside a leprosy colony in northern Iran. A woman's voice reads verse and scripture over images of daily life, and a man's voice reads from other texts. The film asks what it means to look at suffering, and to look at it with tenderness.
Why it matters in cinema history
A founding work of Iranian art cinema and a landmark of the essay-poem documentary, made a few years before the Iranian New Wave broke through in feature films.
Watch with intention
Watch it as a poem in images, where the relationship between what you see and what you hear is the meaning.
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