The House Is Black

Production

After a stay in Europe in 1958, Forugh Farrokhzad, most well-known as a poet, returned to Iran and met and began a relationship with filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan. She worked at his film studio, where she gained an opportunity to work as an editor on his documentaries A Fire and Water and Heat, before then directing The House is Black in collaboration with a leprosy charity.

Reception

Although the film attracted little attention outside Iran when released, it has since been recognized as a landmark in Iranian film. Reviewer Eric Henderson described the film as "[o]ne of the prototypal essay films, The House Is Black paved the way for the Iranian New Wave." In 1963, the film was awarded the grand prize for the category documentary at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in West Germany. Writing for Off Screen in 2014, Roxanne Varzi noted the influence of the Italian neorealist movement on the film. A 2020 piece for The Guardian compared the isolation depicted in the film to that of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2024, director Jonathan Glazer chose to discuss the film on an appearance on the radio show The Treatment on KCRW, describing the film as "so coruscating, so humanist, so political that really, I can't urge you enough to see it".

References

Notes

• Hamid Dabashi, Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema, 451 p. (Mage Publishers, Washington, DC, 2007); Chapter II, pp. 39–70: Forough Farrokhzad; The House Is Black.

References

1. "The House is Black".
2. Bekhrad, Joobin. (2020-04-06). "What an Iranian film about a leper colony can teach us about coronavirus".
3. (November 2011). "A History of Leprosy in Iran during the 19th". [[Iranian Academy of Medical Sciences]].
4. Scutts, Joanna. (2020-11-19). "Feminize Your Canon: Forough Farrokhzad".
5. Milani, Farzaneh. (December 15, 1999). "Farroḵzād, Forūḡ-zamān". Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation.
6. "It Is Only Sound That Remains: Reconstructing Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black".
7. Eric Henderson. (February 22, 2005). "The House Is Black". [[Slant (magazine).
8. (2019-01-30). "Overlooked No More: Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian Poet Who Broke Barriers of Sex and Society". The New York Times.
9. Varzi, Roxanne. (September 2014). "Pictura Poesis: The interplay of poetry, image and ethnography in Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black". Off Screen.
10. (2024-03-09). "Jonathan Glazer on the power of the camera as witness".