 Good evening. Can you hear me? I'm so small and my voice is so puny. Even with the microphone, sometimes people have a hard time hearing me. Thank you very much for being here. Some of you are familiar faces, so I'm most grateful for you to come back. Thank you. And some are here new. You honor me with your presence. So we have already talked about Furukh Faroukhzad's life. To just wrap it up, I said that after these years of being a student of Faroukhzad's poetry and trying hard to write a biography that is not judgmental, that is fair, that really presents the real women, the real Furukh Faroukhzad. I have come to the conclusion that the information we have had so far on the life of this pioneering woman has been great and I have built on it, but I think that Furukh had suffered a lot more as a young person than we have known so far. She had the difficult youth and the fascinating thing is that if as a woman, as a young woman, she did not have quite the control she wanted over her life, poetry allowed her to do that. Poetry became her shelter and her refuge. She has told us that poetry became her window to the world, but also poetry became our window to her world. After about, to be very precise, 39 years of interviews, of reading any book and any article available on Faroukhzad in the languages I know, after having access to unpublished letters that if some of you have had a chance to look at them you will see they're very revealing, like Faroukhzad's poetry. They're as honest as honest can be. What I admire is that she has taken that experience and turned it into an aesthetic experience. I read one of her poems the first night, a poem that has not been given due attention, I think. And there are a few other such poems in the canon of her work, the poem called Daryoft. And basically what mesmerizes me to this day about that poem is that the woman in the poem is experiencing a traumatic experience, but the poem itself is an aesthetic experience. It's sheer poetry. So it's not only the biography of the poet, it's also the biography of Faroukhzad in a way. That was the first day. The second day we discussed some of the themes in Faroukhzad's poetry. I suggested that, of course, love is a major trope, is the central concern, central theme in Faroukhzad's poetry. But that, other than that, the freedom of movement, the right of a woman in a culture previously segregated, the remnant of it still apparent to this day, and perhaps the Islamic revolution in a way, an attempt to turn back and to send women back to bedrooms and kitchens where they presumably belong, that that's the core of Faroukhzad's work. From the first poetry collection where she represents herself as a bird, as a captive bird, as a caged bird, to the last lines of her poems, remember flight, the bird is mortal. Parvazra be khatir besypor, parande mordanist. Flying, the gateless sky where there are no obstacles, no walls, no veils, no masks, no masquerades, has been, again, the major theme of her poetry. And then I tried to put that in a global context to really better understand why I believe more than any other Iranian poet of the modern era, Faroukhzad has become global. If you Google her, you will be surprised by the number of translations of Faroukhzad in all sorts of languages. And if it's okay with you today, I thought another aspect of this talented woman is cinematography. And personally, I was deeply affected by this film. In fact, my serious interest in Faroukhzad began with this film. I vividly recall, I mean, I hope it doesn't sound cheesy, but I remember what I was wearing, the smell of jasmine everywhere, the sound of the fountain in my parents' garden cooled by the breeze, and suddenly the faces of disfigured men and women and children on television. I could neither look in the eye of those people on the screen, nor could I take my eyes away. It was a defining moment in my life. I watched the rest of the film through teary eyes, and I remember, you know, I was a young teenager. I kept thinking, perhaps not in so many words, but in my young mind, how did this woman take such a traumatic experience and turn it into such an art? I think the film, 22 Minutes, is one of the world masterpieces in documentary. I have shown it a few times in medical schools, and people who specialize in leprosy tell me they have never seen a film that shows leprosy so vividly. So the language is simple. The candor is disarming. The honesty, the intellectual integrity of this woman is amazing. And a scene that was to be hidden and silenced is given full view. It's not an easy film to watch. I want to warn you the first time. I suppose many have seen it already, but it is really a film worth watching. So with your permission, we will first show the film. It's about 20, some minutes, 22 minutes, and then we will discuss the film. While we're getting ready, many, at least film critics in the West have considered this documentary one of the ten best films ever made. Ten best documentaries ever made. A lot can be said about this film, and in fact a lot has been said. From its visual poetry, to its technical merits, to its aesthetic values, to its conception, execution, directing, editing, to its sheer compassion for a group of ostracized, neglected, unheard, unseen people. Quite clearly, the film, like Farozo's poetry, refuses to keep silent about a taboo topic. And that was a taboo topic. You remember, I'm sure, the opening lines of what is considered Iran's modern novel, the first Iranian modern novel, the blind owl, Boufakour, in which he says he opens the book saying that there are certain pains in life that cannot be talked about like leprosy. Better not discuss that. And others have said that it's a site that should not be looked at. You remember the films in which there are a few seconds, a few minutes of leprosy, Ben Hur, there is Papillon. In those scenes, the patients become the disease. They become lepers. Farozo doesn't do that. Every single patient in that colony has an individuality, has a human dignity, shows her or his resilience. And Farozo shows us a community. They dance, they sing, they sit in the sun and soak up the energy of the sun. They smoke, they breastfeed their children, they apply makeup, they wear jewellery. So she wanted to prove to the readers, to her viewers that this is a community like any other community. But today, I don't want to talk about what has already been said about the film, which is important and wonderful. And if you want, we can discuss it during the Q&A. What I want to do today is to talk about how this film was made possible. How a group of ostracized people accepted to play such an important part in this film. What has rarely been talked about is the scene behind the scene of this film. So a little bit of history about the film. This film had all the making of not a successful film. So the film, Mr. Gullistan told me that $12,000 was spent in making the film, which is not a lot of money. It was made by a novice cinematographer. We didn't have that much experience in filmmaking yet. It was not a happy film. It was the sight of a group of patients really denied their human dignity. It's a 22-minute film. It has 401 shots, it's black and white, although it refuses to see the world as black or white. That's one of the powers of the film, and we will discuss that in a moment. And it was a feared disease. At the time when this film was made, it was believed, as it was said in the film, that this disease is contagious, communicable. That's why people were put in two leprosyriums. We had in Iran two leprosyria, Baba Bagi next to Tabriz, about 20 kilometers from Tabriz, and Mehrab Khan in Shiraz. These were the two leprosyria in Iran at the time. Turan Fadurzad, Furuq's mother, told me the day Furuq came to tell her that she was going to go to Baba Bagi to make a film. She was almost in tears. She said, I did everything I could to dissuade her from going, because I was so scared. This was a risky, medically speaking, enterprise. But we are very happy that Furuq did go. The first time she went with Dr. Raji, God bless his soul, a man who really helped patients of leprosy a lot. And the reason they did this is because he had gone to Mr. Gulistan Studio and asked for a film to humanize the patients and also to ask for help. And indeed, one of the inhabitants of the leprosarium told me that Baba Bagi, after Furuq left and after the film was shown, and money started coming in, doctors started coming in, a lot more nurses. Nobody called it Baba Bagi anymore. They called it Baba Abadi, that it was now in such a better condition. Queen Farah Diba, Shahbani, has a story in one of her books in which she tells the story that I find fascinating. And I want to tell you before, I tell you why I think what she did behind the scene is in fact as important as what she did behind the camera. So we had gone to visit Baba Bagi in 1965. That's three years after Furuq had been there. And she had some entourage, some people went there and apparently some had taken boxes of sweets. And she said, she noticed, this is the queen saying and you can check, they were so concerned of getting close to these patients that they were literally throwing the sweets at them, hitting them in the head. That's the general perception of this disease at the time. And what did Furuq Farah Diba do? She went there the first time with Dr. Raji, looked around and did the work she needed to do and went back and decided to make the film for sure. So she went there and she lived with these patients for 12 days. One of the most interesting, enlightening interviews I have done and I have interviewed at least 20, 25 of our foremost writers, poets, cinematographers, some of them for weeks. This was by an illiterate woman and forgive me for saying this, she kept repeating, when I wanted to do the interview she kept saying, Hanuman Milani, Miss Milani, I'm an illiterate woman, what do you think I can help you with? I can't help your project. And I said, leave it to me, let me ask my questions. It was one of the most enlightening. She taught me a lot. She said, Furuq arrived. There were no film making for the first few days and she kept repeating, do you know she would kiss us? She would touch us. She would hold our kids, even the ones that were not in perfect health. She would sit at the table with us, share a meal with us, eat from the plate that we were eating from. And it is a very touching, a very beautiful story that tells us about a part of Furuq Farozad that at least I didn't know to that extent, the compassion, the humanity. It also tells us how she produced this film. These patients were cooperating with her. All the other films in which patients of leprosy have appeared, there were no cooperation. Those were a stolen glance. Furuq Farozad is not a stolen glance. These people sit in front of the camera play for her, talk to her. The other scene that she kept telling me that in the course of the interviews, I did two interviews with, in fact she is the mother of Mr. Hosenia Mansuri, Khanume Talbe Zobedi. She said there was a wedding and you see it in the film. And Furuq came and she wanted to... Khanume Talbe Zobedi said she's the one who told her about the wedding and Furuq went there and when she saw it was a very festive, she said suddenly she got up and she started dancing for everybody. She said this is one of the most memorable wedding ceremonies in that leprosarium. So before presenting the film, before starting even to film, Furuq had gained the trust of these patients. She had treated them the way she should have, like human beings, not like a disease. And that's how she got the cooperation she got. Now, you saw the film has several similarities with Farozo's poetry. And again, I think they're instrumental in making this film, the masterpiece that it is. The film is brutally honest. It does not sugarcoat anything. You know, she went there, she studied, she had studied before, and she wants you to know everything. To me, this film is a biography of a disease. And in a minute I will say it's also an autobiography of the poet of the director. And it's this transcendence of all boundaries, of all traditional boundaries, this intertextuality between the film and her poetry that again adds a layer of complexity to it. The film plays close attention to details, like her poetry. Details very important. For Farozo doesn't like generalization. You know, she's not going to start from day one of the creation of the world and get us then by the end and give us two minutes about what she wanted to talk about. No matter how horrifying the story, she's going to give it to us, she's going to tell us, and she's going to let us see it for herself. No facile escapism in this film. Of course, it was a forbidden journey to a forbidden place and a forbidden topic. But the film does not become an exercise in morbid curiosity. Did you notice there is not a single scene about death, about burial? Whereas we know people go there waiting for death to arrive. As I said, it's not a stolen glance either. It's with reverence for the privacy of these patients. Whereas she gives us all those information that we need to understand leprosy. She really embraces the individuality of each patient. Remember at some point, they're each given a name, Mariam, Asadullah, this and that. And you know that in all the films in which patients of leprosy appear, they appear as a group. They never have a name. They never have an individuality. And Furuq, as I have come to accept and believe, is one of the most important figures of Iranian modernity. She brought the private life of a woman in the segregated arena of Persian poetry. She put the naked eye, the person who happened to be herself because she's the most autobiographical poet we have, at the center of her poetry. As she did in this film, individuals matter. To me, the most important thing about this film is that it does not settle on a simple or singular meaning. Never tells us that she knows it all, that she knows the whole thing. You've noticed that in a film produced in 1962, there is a multiplicity of voices. There is a symphony of competing narratives in this film. At least there are three. There is the disembodied voice of science. The film starts with the voice of Mester Golestan. He imparts all the knowledge available at the time about leprosy. And about the intention of this film, the world is filled with ugliness, but we can't shut our eyes to them. We can't resolve those problems. So there is the etiology of the disease, the symptoms of the disease, but also an expression of hope. We can do something about this. Then there is the voice of the storyteller. This is the voice of the poet, Fouro Farrozat. It's fascinating. There is not a single word in this film that Fouro Farrozat utters that has not been taken from the Bible. Every single word, every single line, is from the Old Testament. She has sometimes mixed a few verses, but everything she says is from the Old Testament. Significantly and remarkably, she's the one who complains, oh God, she laments, you knew I'm going to be created with this dreadful disease. Why did you then do that? Where is the justice here? So she's the one lamenting, challenging God, challenging the circumstances under which the patients live. And then there is a third voice, individual voices of the patients, and it's a litany of Thanksgiving. Oh, thank you God for granting me eyes to see the beauties of the world. Thank you God for giving me ears to listen to the songs of the birds and to listen to the world. We really have not listened to Fouro Farrozat. She knew the pain of not being fully heard. She allows them the chance to express their gratitude. And in several of the interviews that she granted after she returned from Bababagi, she said, one of the most important lessons I learned in this trip was that depression, suicide, not being grateful, did not have much place in this leprosarium, in this black house. But Farrozat did something also unusual when she was there. How much more time do I have? When she was there, Fourokh adopted a son from two patients. Both the mother and the father were afflicted with leprosy. He's in the film. He's the young boy who says, flower, play, son, four beautiful things he enumerates. He very much looked like her own biological son. But you know, she was deprived of even visitation rights with her son, with her biological son. The last ten years of Fourokh Farrokhzat, and she only lived 32 years, there is not a single photograph with her biological son. Not a single photograph. She never, they did meet a couple of times. Fourokh went to the school and talked to her, but that's the topic of tomorrow's conversation and I will tell you more about it. But to go back to Hosseini Mansuri that she adopted, the Mansuri family had just arrived from the other leprosy, Mehrab Khan to Baba Baqi, and it was sheer luck that they arrived there a couple of days before Farrokhzat arrived and the minute she saw Hosseini, we were told she decided that she was going to adopt this son. Indeed, she did adopt him and together they came back to, they went to Tehran and Khannun Farrokhzat, the mother told me the first time she met Hosseini Mansuri, she was completely shocked. She thought it was her own Farrokhz biological son, Kamiar Shapur, but it wasn't. Another thing that is fascinating about this film and in continuation of the conversation we've had the last two days, the last two talks, is the focus of the film, the subtext of the film, the title of the film, The House is Black. This film was about leprosy. This film was not about a house and I find it fascinating that the same focus of Farrokhzat's poetry, the difficulties she had within traditional families is represented here as the house being black. The focus is on the house. The focus is on the colony rather than on the disease. And that should tell us a lot about how autobiographical this film is. I have a lot of specific examples to give you about how I think this film can be read as an autobiography, but I don't have much more time left. I just want to tell you how this film impacted me when I first saw it and eventually when I had come to a standstill when I really couldn't finish the biography I have been working on. One day, watching and re-watching this film again, I had a moment of epiphany. I said, this is an ideal biography. This is an ideal life narrative. Tell the truth. Don't judge. Let the people have their own voices. Be polyphonic. Give everybody a voice. Allow competing narratives. Allow competing truths. There is not a single truth. The storyteller can complain in this film. The scientists can give us disembodied, logical scientific information. The patients can tell the hell, but the two of you, we're patient, we're happy and we thank our God. All these voices coming together, echoing each other, contradicting each other, make this film so powerful. And this is what makes Frou Farrouzade's poetry so powerful. He used the analogy of a rainbow for Frou Farrouzade's poetry. I said, Frou's five collections read systematically, not cherry-picking a line here, cherry-picking an image there, taking one from 12 years ago, mixing and matching it with someone said at the end of her life. If you take the whole body of her work, it is like a rainbow. It is the magical, mystical moment when the sun and the rain come together in the sky. And out of the union of the two, you have a caravan of a multiplicity of colors. This film allows us a multiplicity of stories, a multiplicity of truths, a multiplicity of lives. I'm going to end with one of the best theorists of life narratives, Julian Barnes. I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He has written this fabulous biography of Flaubert, Flaubert's parrot. The focus is on the parrot of Flaubert, presumably. But he compares the writing of biographies to a fishing net. And then, so there are two perspectives. You can look at the fishing net as an instrument with which you fish and you capture a fish, or you can look at it as a multiplicity of holes connected together with a string. I think the best biographies are exactly like that. There are multiplicity of silences, of contradictions, of ambiguities and paradoxes. They don't have the ultimate truth. After all these years, I've worked on Thouroux-Farroçois much longer than she lived. I don't have the truth about Farroçois's life. At best, my biography is the net that has captured fleeting moments in the life of this pioneering poet.