The House is Black

‘There is no shortage of ugliness in the world. If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more.’ Thus begins the narration of this short film by one of Iran’s most venerated modern poets, a woman whose writing still permeates Iranian culture. (Her poem The Wind Will Carry Us is prominently featured in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1999 film). In the 2001 book Close-Up: Iranian Cinema, Hamid Dabashi cites The House is Black as the beginning of an adventurous decade of Iranian filmmaking: ‘This must be considered by far the most significant film of the early 1960s, a film that with its poetic treatment of leprosy anticipated much that was to follow in Iranian cinema of the 1980s and 1990s.’ Chris Marker compares the film to Buñuel’s Las hurdes.
Farrokhzad’s film may be a ‘poetic treatment of leprosy’, but it’s also a factual documentary on the daily routines in a leper colony in northern Iran. One of the striking counterpoints to the film’s potentially depressing subject is Farrokhzad’s narration, spoken in hushed, compassionate tones by the director herself.
This is undoubtedly a difficult film to watch, but it’s all the more generous and compelling for being exactly that. Addressing her subject directly with a sensitive but unflinching gaze, Farrokhzad breaks through the repugnant aura that has often haunted victims of the disease and affirms their resilience and human beauty.