Before the Revolution: Film & Poetry in Iran (Church of Film)

A collection of poetic pieces that launched the Iranian New Wave! This program includes a set of beautiful work from the Golestan Film Workshop, the first independent film studio in Iran.

Ebrahim Golestan, together with his creative partner the poet Forugh Farrokhzad, created masterful, subversive film poems such as A FIRE and THE HOUSE IS BLACK–transforming a towering inferno into a modern dragon, a monster of modernization in the former, and weaving a poem of existential compassion out of a leper colony in the latter.

Also included will be Golestan’s THE CROWN JEWELS OF IRAN, with some of its censored elements restored. Lastly, the French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse’s THE LOVERS WIND, a beloved Iranian state production that resulted in Lamorisse’s death in a helicopter crash. Subtitles for the Lovers’ Wind by Church of Film!