Radiograph of a Family

Radiograph of a Family

Courtesy of Red Sea International Film Festival

VERDICT: Director Firouzeh Khosrovani’s own parents embody the lacerating split of Iran into modern liberals and Islamic fundamentalists after the 1978 revolution, in a personal doc of startling clarity and impact.

A shy, religious young bride marries the photograph of her absent husband in Tehran, then flies to Geneva to start a life together in Radiograph of a Family. In Switzerland they become part of the swinging Sixties — until the Iranian revolution resets their roles, along with history, in unexpected fashion. The achievement of this fascinating documentary is the sensitivity and conviction with which it takes Iran’s ferocious clash of ideologies from the streets into director Firouzeh Khosrovani’s (Fest of Duty) own home.

This is her third feature-length documentary, first appearing in IDFA a year ago and still traveling, most recently to Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea fest as a “Festival Favorite”. It is an Oscar hopeful in the documentary category. With a fresh and intimately involving voice, it explores the great divide that separates Iranian society into two parts: those who follow Islamic orthodoxy and those whose ideas are secular and more modern.

Deftly reconstructing the lives of her father and mother out of hundreds of photographs, super 8 movies and archival footage, with the aid of art director Morteza Ahmadvand, Khosrovani thrusts the viewer into a real-life narrative that sometimes reads like fantasy. You couldn’t invent two characters more perfect than her parents to illustrate the terrible personal toll the revolution took within the microcosm of Iranian families. The story is particularly touching because it is also a romance, a love story between two impossibly different people.

When Hossein starts courting the much younger Tayi, who he meets in Iran, he is a medical student in Geneva with a comfortable career stretching out ahead of him in the West. She boards the plane that will take her away from her family and friends with many qualms, going so far as to ask an ayatollah if she’s doing to the right thing to move abroad, when to wear a hejab and what to eat in the West. Her husband shows patience and tenderness, as well as paternalism, in coaxing her to adapt to his own secular life: his friends smoke and drink, eat pork, dance in mixed couples and wear short skirts, all quite a shock for Tayi. In the end, she removes her veil to please him. But along with it, she loses an important part of her identity and begins to feel that she belongs nowhere. This is a very sensitive observation from the filmmaker-narrator, who does a spectacular job of remaining neutral in an ideological battle that would soon escalate beyond anyone’s expectations.

When Tayi gets pregnant with Firouzeh, she convinces Hossein to move back to Tehran and her veil reappears (though in the same period, a female cousin is photographed in a bathing suit.) “I lived in two different Irans,” recalls the narrator. Soon Tayi takes another big step towards independence from her husband and becomes the disciple of a charismatic sociologist and revolutionary, Ali Shariati, whose lectures on reconciling modernity and Islam draw rapt, cultish crowds. The more she asserts her religious feelings, the less voice her husband has in their marriage. He buries himself in his work as a doctor (it’s the time of the Iran-Iraq war and the hospitals are full of wounded soldiers) and retreats into his cultured interests in music, art, dance. Now it is little Firouzeh who feels divided loyalties, wanting to please both mom and dad.

Evocative, sometimes almost dreamlike, the film’s most involving scenes begin when the Islamic revolution sweeps the country. Unshakeable in her religious convictions, Tayi marches in the enormous anti-Shah, pro-Khomeini protests of the time, shoulder to shoulder with the Ayatollah’s supporters. Khosrovani and Ahmadvand’s choices of archival footage from the period are electrifying, particularly some blood-curdling shots of a women’s military camp where figures hidden under black chadors learn to fire machine guns and torch American flags. Yet the narrator notes, no doubt justly, that the revolution gave purpose and meaning to many women’s lives, taking them outside their homes and into the streets.

Pulling the different time periods together is a recurring shot of two spacious white rooms in the family home. There are no people in these shots. First (symbolically, from the father’s POV), the camera slowly advances from a big double bed over which is hung his favorite painting of a female nude, toward the second room with its grand piano. Later in the film, the angle is reversed as though to show the mother’s viewpoint. The painting and piano are gone, and the bed has been replaced with a long table for women who come to the house for prayer meetings.

Director, screenplay: Firouzeh Khosrovani
Producers: Fabien Greenberg, Bard Kjoge Ronning
Cinematography: Mohammad Reza Jahanpanah
Art director: Morteza Ahmadvand
Editing: Farahnaz Sharifi, Jila Ipakchi, Rainer M. Trinkler
Music: Peyman Yazdanian
Sound: Ensieh Maleki
Production companies: Antipode Films (Norway) in association with Rainy Pictures, Dschoint Ventschr, Storyline Studios
World sales: Taskovski Films
Venue: Red Sea Film Festival (Festival Favorites)
In Farsi, French
82 minutes