Chigh. 1995. Iran. Written and directed by Mohammad Reza Aslani. Narrated by Manouchehr Anvar. DCP. In English. 40 min.
Unofficially barred from filmmaking by the Islamic regime for more than a decade, Aslani finally secured funding to produce a documentary in 1995. Recalling his early work, in which he would mix poetry and mysticism, Aslani observes the weaving of a Chigh carpet by Kurdish nomads in Iran, documenting their Sufi rituals while also recounting creation myths in the poetry of the 19th-century Kurdish mystic Haji Nemat Jeyhounabadi.
Tarikhaneh. 1972. Iran. Written and directed by Mohammad Reza Aslani. Narrated by Mohsen Sohrabi. DCP. In Persian; English subtitles. 15 min.
Located in the northern Iranian town of Damghan, Tarikhaneh (“God’s House”), which has stood for more than 1,000 years, is among the oldest mosques in the Islamic world. Aslani’s documentary portrait, commissioned by the Iranian Ministry of Culture, deepens our appreciation of this architectural and archaeological marvel by combining the insights of the anthropologist Karim Pirnia with a text by the 11th-century mystic Khajeh Abdollah Ansari. For his first color film, Aslani strikingly contrasts the blinding desert light and the mosque’s dark interior in the Baroque manner of Caravaggio.
Our Cultural Heritage. 1971. Iran. Written and directed by Mohammad Reza Aslani. Narrated by Mohsen Sohrabi. DCP. In Persian; English subtitles. 20 min.
Aslani takes us on a mesmerizing journey through Iran’s archaeological sites of Chogha Zanbil, Kerman, Damghan, Yazd, and Kerman, narrating the tale of the Sufi mystic Daghoughi through a 13th-century poem by Rumi. The Pahlavi Ministry of Culture, expecting a far more conventional documentary, kept the film from being shown. It was only in 2024, when Aslani set out to digitize the film, that he discovered two reels had been lost. MoMA presents the world-premiere of Aslani’s re-edited version, which seeks to recapture the meditative flow of his original work despite its missing sequences.
Program 75 min.