Simultaneously the first film by Marva Nabili, in a stunning directorial debut, and the oldest surviving (in its entirety) Iranian film directed by a woman. In this 4K restoration, a young woman in pre-revolutionary Iran finds herself at a crossroads between tradition and the desire for freedom, where her refusal of marriage offers is equated by her family with possession by malevolent spirits.
Digitally restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by the Golden Globe Foundation, Century Arts Foundation, Farhang Foundation and Mark Amin. Restored from the 16mm original A/B negatives, color reversal internegative, magnetic track and optical track negative. Laboratory services by illuminate Hollywood, Corpus Fluxus, Endpoint Audio Labs, Audio Mechanics, Simon Daniel Sound. Special thanks to Thomas Fucci, Marva Nabili and Garineh Nazarian.
Shot in just six days in the year before the Iranian revolution, Khake Sar Beh Mohr (The Sealed Soil, 1977) is the first film — at least of with a copy that has survived — directed by a woman in Iran. Marva Nabili’s film, inspired by real events, is set in a village in the south of the country, where a young girl is pressured into marriage. Nabili worked meticulously with the protagonist, the non-professional actress Flora Shabaviz, building a space of authenticity that the influence of Robert Bresson and the presence of all the other characters, real inhabitants of the village, helped to compose. With a background in painting, and using long takes, Nabili shows us a beautiful but oppressing space of the house where, in a patriarchal and conservative society, the female condition is thought of from the perspective of imprisonment and repetition of domestic tasks, as opposed to an urban outside, and, above all, to a solitary unveiling of poetic moments of escape. (Carlos Natálio)
