Wednesday June 8, 2011
7-9pm
Free!

Centre for Possible Studies
64 Seymour Street
London W1H 5BW

In conjunction with our residency at the Centre for Possible Studies, the Bidoun Library will present a program of two films drawn from our collaboration with the online archive UbuWeb.

The program will be introduced by Masoud Golsorkhi, editor of Tank magazine.

A short documentary about Ardeshir Mohasses (1938-2008) featuring rare footage of the Iranian artist in his studio in Iran before his self-exile in New York which was to last over thirty years. Mohasses’ anti-shah and anti-Islamic Republic cartoons used settings and costumes of the Qajar dynasty of 1794 to 1925 — a misdirection that fooled nobody. The film features commentary from Iranian intellectuals of the time including Houshang Taheri, Javad Mojabi, and Fereidoun Gilani whereas Mohasses, a man of few words, is noticeably mute throughout.

In northern Iran, a schoolboy from a village near Gorgan is said to have discovered that the railway had been undermined and washed away by a flood. As the story goes, when he saw the approaching train, he set fire to his jacket, ran towards the train and averted a serious and fatal accident. Kamran Shirdel’s film The Night it Rained does not concentrate on the heroic deed promulgated in the newspapers, but on a caricature of social and subtle political behavior — the way in which witnesses and officials manage to insert themselves into the research into this event. Shirdel uses newspaper articles and interviews with railway employees, the governor, the chief of police, the village teacher and pupils — each of whom tell a different version of the event. In the end, they all contradict each other, while the group of possible or self-appointed heroes constantly grows. With his cinematic sleights of hand, Shirdel paints a bittersweet picture of Iranian Society in which truth, rumor, and lie can no longer be distinguished.

Upon completion the film was banned and confiscated, and Shirdel was finally expelled from the Ministry. It was released seven years later in 1974 to participate in the Third Tehran International Film Festival, where it won the GRAND PRIX by a unanimous vote, only to be banned again until after the revolution.

Nedamatgah (Women’s Prison) (1965)
Tehran Is the Capital of Iran (1966)
Qaleh (The Women’s Quarter) (1966)
The Night It Rained or The Epic of Gorgan Village Boy (1967)

Bidoun and UbuWeb are pleased to present four of Shirdel’s most renowned socio-political documentaries, films that courageously and frankly revealed the darker side of Iran’s economic boom, analyzing the effects of a society flush with oil money. These films were steeped in a deep social consciousness reminiscent of the best of the Italian Neo-realist tradition, the cinema that had influenced him deeply during his studies in Italy. Shirdel’s furious documentaries and cinematic language were a bone of contention both under the Shah and following his exile, because they spoke up for the underprivileged and, in doing so, exposed and criticized the corruption of the mechanism of power. Because of the severe censorship, nearly all his films were banned and confiscated, and in the end he was expelled from The Ministry and put on the blacklist. Seven years after it was made (and censored), his The Epic of the Gorgani Village Boy (The Night It Rained!), after receiving the GRAN PRIX at The Third Tehran International Film Festival (1974), was immediately banned again and remained so (like his Nedamatgah (Women’s Prison, 1965), Qaleh (Women’s Quarter, 1966), Tehran Is the Capital of Iran (1966), and others) until after the revolution.

Visit Kamran Shirdel on UbuWeb

In honor of the SPORTS issue and our feature on Iranian dancercise king Mohammad Khordadian, Bidoun presents a compilation of some of our favorite early ’90s Tehrangelesi pop songs that soundtrack Khordadian’s videos, including:

Martik — Niloofar
Fataneh — Namehraboon
Moein & Faezeh — Del Shekasteh
Bijan Mortazavi — Havaye Eshgh
Black Cats — Rhythm of Love
Moein — Tamana
Hassan Shamaizadeh — Ye Dokhtar Daram
Siavash — Gol
Fataneh — Mola Mamadjan
Bijan Mortazavi — Zendegi
Samad — Hele Dan
Shahram Shabpareh — Shabe Toye Raaheh
Jalal Hemmati — Baba Karam

Click here to download!

This past Sunday Bidoun screened a special hour-long montage for BLVCK AMERICA’S inaugural BLVCK EYE film night at the Ace Hotel in New York. Responding to popular demand, we’ve uploaded it for all to see along with some photos of the screening.

The montage is comprised of shorts and clips from materials which in some manner depict a relationship between Iran and the rest of the world: Farsi in American films, English in Iranian films, French directors commissioned to make films in Iran — even Princess Soraya Bakhtiari’s acting debut in a throwaway Antonioni film.

Click here to see a guide to source films.

BLVCK AMERICA’s Saheer Umar introduces the BLVCK EYE series

Team Bidoun (Lisa Farjam and child, Babak Radboy, and Tiffany Malakooti) on deck

A scene from The Invincible Six directed by Jean Negulesco. Shot entirely in Iran, the film features Elke Sommer (seen here as a village vixen) along with some marginal Hollywood figures but also includes Iranian cast members (Behrouz Vossoughi) and production team (Fereydoun Hoveyda is credited as a “consultant” and Masoud Kimiai as “assistant director”).