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A CELEBRATION OF IRANIAN CINEMA Screening

FilmFarsi

UCLA Film & Television Archive and Farhang Foundation are pleased to present filmmaker Ehsan Khoshbakht’s illuminating essay film Filmfarsi (2020) as part of the Archive’s Virtual Screening Room.

Filmfarsi will be available for streaming via our unique link from Friday, November 13 through Thursday, November 19. Admission is $10 and a portion of your purchase will support the Archive’s public programs. Included with purchase is a pre-recorded, post-screening conversation with filmmaker Ehsan Khoshbakht.

The popular cinema that flourished in Iran under the Pahlavi regime between 1953 and 1979, a period bracketed by a coup and a revolution, exists now largely on poor quality, illegal VHS tapes. From these grainy, illicit sources, filmmaker Ehsan Khoshbakht draws the kaleidoscope of images that make up his sharp, critical history of “Filmfarsi,” proudly “Filmed in VHS Scope.” Khoshbakht’s deep familiarity and fascination with this period of Iranian cinema yields a tantalizing array of film clips and stars but this extended montage essay is neither wholly nostalgic nor celebratory. A genre cinema that “starts at B and descends to the lower letters of the alphabet,” Filmfarsi, he argues, reflected the country’s “split-personality” back to an audience struggling to reconcile the internal social, cultural and political contradictions of the era. His typology of Filmfarsi characters and stories is a line up of mothers and whores, brutes and clowns, clashing in melodramas pitched to the emotional extremes. When the country exploded in the Islamic revolution, Khoshbakht reflects, “the cinemas were burned and their ghosts were let loose in the streets.”

Color & B/W, in English and Persian with English subtitles, 85 min.

Special Thanks: Ehsan Khoshbakht; Grasshopper Films.

EHSAN KHOSHBAKHT

Ehsan Khoshbakht (1980, Iran) is a London-based Iranian filmmaker, film curator and writer. He has directed short documentaries on subjects ranging from Duke Ellington in the Middle East to Expressionist architecture and cinema. Farhang Foundation and the UCLA Film & Television Archive are proud to present his feature film debut as part of this year’s UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema.