Fifi Howls From Happiness

Director Mitra Farahani and producer Marjaneh Moghimi in person!

An act of recovery, and an entrancing documentary construction that appears to weave its own form as it proceeds, according to the inspirations and demands of its jubilant, egotistical and irascible subject. That subject is the Iranian painter and sculptor Bahman Mohasses, who was a celebrated and iconoclastic figure in the pre-revolutionary 60s and 70s, known for his art as well as his merciless public pronouncements. Mohasses remained in Iran after the revolution, but he frequently traveled in secret to Italy, which he finally made his home in 2006. Throughout the years, many of his works were destroyed by the new government, and many more by Mohasses himself. Filmmaker Mitra Farhani tracked down Mohasses in a Roman hotel and filmed him during the last six months of his life. The poetic self-portrait that they made together is a joyous celebration of freedom—to create, to destroy, to indulge, to pontificate and make withering judgments, to live without regret.

Screening with:

23rd August 2008
Laura Mulvey, Faysal Abdullah, Mark Lewis | UK | 2013 | 22m
It is often said that great filmmaking is inseparable from great storytelling, and this elegant, moving short film is eloquent proof. Abdullah, an Iraqi journalist who has lived in London since the late 1980s, honors his brilliant younger brother Kamel (who like himself was forced into exile by Saddam Hussein’s persecution of the leftist intelligentsia) by telling the ultimately tragic story of Kamel’s life in Europe and his return to what he hoped would be a changed Iraq in 2003. The film is not only a tender and compelling portrait of one brother by another, but a glimpse of a side of Iraqi society that is almost completely unknown in America.