When viewing the line-up to the 2021 WOW Film Festival this was the title I was most looking forward to,thanks to it exploring the history of Iranian genre cinema.
View on the film:
Introducing the audience to this world of cinema with rusting cans of film reels, writer/director Ehsan Khoshbakht goes back to 1930, and packs every frame with tantalizing glimpses of pre-Revolution Iranian cinema, from Feminist remakes of Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954) and Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953) (!),to the gloriously kitsch,Euro-Spy style thrills of Dariush Mehrjui's debut film Diamond 33 (1967-also reviewed)
Reeling out criticism similar to that which Spaghetti Western also received,with this era of genre films from Iran being giving the derogatory term " Filmfarsi", Khoshbakht makes a excellent case for this tragically overlooked area of cinema.
Khoshbakht smoothly crosses the film clips with details on the build up to the Revolution,including the Cinema Rex fire/attack during a screening of The Deer (1974),where everyone in the audience was killed. Khoshbakht also displays the distance of this wave in Princess Soraya going to work with Michelangelo Antonioni on I tre volti (1965-also reviewed) and the frozen in time freeze frame ending to the Iranian remake of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960),as a new wave arrived.
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