There has never been a moment in the long history of cinema when it was confined to its current frontiers. The very first sound film, Dokhtar-e Lor/Lor Girl, 1932, also known as The Yesterday and of Today, was produced by Ardeshir and Abdolhossein Sepanta in the Imperial Film Company in Bombay. There is a larger frame of reference that extends from Europe to the Ottoman and Russian empires all the way to Egypt and India, which was the site of the rise of Persian prose and poetry as well as visual and performing arts.
The figure of Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967), a leading poet of her time, shines over the history of cinema. With a single short documentary, The House is Black (1962), Farrokhzad set film on a creative path from which it has not diverged since. Shot on location in a leper colony, The House is Black defined the fusion of fact and fiction in a unique and ground-breaking way. Before that fateful decade had ended, Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969) was smuggled out of screened at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, where it won the critics’ prize (Fipresci); a screening in Berlin further consolidated its global recognition as a defining moment in the emerging cinema.
