A poem to family life against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution.
Iranians Hossein and Tayi got married, knowing each other only from photographs: he studied in Geneva as a radiologist while she lived in Tehran. Their daughter Firouzeh made a film about the marriage of these two completely different people—her parents. Hossein loved Europe, quality cocktails, and vinyl records; Tayi was very religious and enthusiastically accepted the Islamic Revolution in Iran, where, at her insistence, the family returned from Switzerland. The conflict between tradition and modern history in a given family was superimposed on the same conflict on the scale of the whole country: Firouzeh Khosrovani rhymes shots of the revolutionary chronicle with faded family photographs, the sounds of shooting in the streets with tender instrumental music. Being a thoughtful researcher, she X-rays through her family archive, aiming to answer the question of why the life of her parents and her home country turned out like this and not another way. She is also, obviously, a remarkable artist: the carefully constructed shots and soundtrack, nostalgic colors and airy atmosphere make Radiograph of a Family a paradigmatic art-house documentary, which won the director the main prize of the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.
Radiograph of a Family
Dir. Firouzeh Khosrovani
Norway, Iran, Switzerland, 2020. 82 min. 16+