Filmfarsi | First Impressions

A greatly beloved work, a landmark of Algerian cinema. Filmed in 1976, in that period between the end of the Algerian War in 1962 and the start of what would become known as the black decade of the 90s, Omar Gatlato is a study of masculinity and the self-harm caused by a culture of machismo, a document of Algiers and Algerian popular culture in that period, an experiment in film form and one of the films Youssef Chahine recommended we see. I was very glad we did. The podcast below touches on all of these topics and more.

The podcast my also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

Listeners can see a trailer of the film below:

The Youssef Chahine Interview by Tom Luddy, translated by Ehsan Khoshbakht can be accessed here:

Indeed Omar Gatlato has interesting links with Khoshbakht’s observations on Iranian cinema during roughly the same period in Filmfarsi. Our podcast on the film and our conversation with Ehsan can be followed up here:

Conversation with Ehsan: https://notesonfilm1.com/2021/04/30/jose-arroyo-in-conversation-with-ehsan-khoshbakht-on-filmfarsi-2019/

Podcast on Filmfarsi: https://notesonfilm1.com/2021/03/16/jose-arroyo-richard-lane-on-filmfarsi-ehsan-khoshbakht-2019-wales-one-world-festival/

Natasha Marie Llorens writes:

‘

En Attendant Omar Gatlato expresses the exceptionalism of the

1970s in the country, which historian James McDougall describes

as the era of a “new, young and profoundly transformed Algeria.”3

The book, an excerpt of which has been translated and is included

in this volume, takes its framing metaphor from Merzak Allouache’s

film Omar Gatlato, an extraordinary cinematic portrait of Algerian

youth released in 1976, fourteen years after the end of the War of

Liberation. For Tamzali, Omar Gatlato was not only paradigmatic

of a period saturated with the claim for subjective emancipation, it

inaugurated an awareness of that freedom: “Now we know. We were

waiting for Omar Gatlato. Merzak Allouache clasps the old mummy

that film had become, and plunges Algerian cinema into a pool of

tenderness and rebellion.”

Her marvellous Introduction to the Waiting for Omar Gatlato Exhibition can be accessed here: NLlorens_waiting-for-omar-gatlato_introduction (1)

José Arroyo

One of the great surprises and pleasures of the Wales One World Film Festival was the opportunity to see Filmfarsi, a great documentary film on the significance of popular Iranian cinema from 1953-1979. Richard Layne and I were so fascinated by the film that we podcast on it . The viewing also encouraged us to see and podcast on other Iranian films in the festival, which, it turned out, were programmed by Ehsan Khoshbakht , the director of Filmfarsi. We managed to see Downpour (Bahram Beyzaie, Iran, 1979) and The Deer/ Gavaznha (Masoud Kimiai, 1974). These films were related to but significantly different from the more art-house Iranian cinema we had experienced before in places like Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato, e.g. Abbas Kiarostami’s First Case, Second Case/ Ghazieh Shekle Aval Shekle Dovom (1979) and Mohammed Rezia Asiani’s Chess of the Wind/ Shatranj-e-Baad (1976).

This all resulted in many interesting conversations and led me to seek out Ehsan Khoshbakht, the director of Filmfarsi, to find out more about the film and the cinema that is its subject. We discuss the process that led to the film; the Iranian film industry in this period, the extent to which it is transnational, co-productions, the importance of film festivals such as the Moscow Film Festival to Iranian Cinema; the relationship of Filmfarsi to the Iranian New Wave; the melodramatic mode of much of this cinema that crosses across various genres (crime films, musicals, domestic melodrama); we discuss how much of this cinema was lost in the aftermath of the revolution and why this was so. We also discuss the process of recovering the films, which are collectively also a history of Iran and Iranian people in this period. The podcast can be listened to below: