The House Is Black/خانه سیاه است
A month or so ago I came upon a mini Iranian film festival on public television. There were two short films by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, The School That Was Blown Away (1996), and Images from the Qajar Dynasty (1992). But there was also a film that was something beautiful and terrible all at once, The House is Black ( Khaneh siah ast in Farsi) created in 1962 by a woman I had not known of until now: a renowned Persian poet named Forough Farrokhzad. Essentially, The House is Black is a documentary of a leper colony, an awful thing given beauty and humanity by Farrokhzad. In 1962 there were two drugs, Promin and Dapsone, used with limited and painful success to ease the disease, but a true treatment wasn’t developed until the 1970s. It is clear that even the earlier treatments did not make their way to this desolate colony in Iran. Still, with her unflinching shots of these afflicted people as they go about their daily lives, breathtaking is the scene of a woman applying eyeliner, and a...