The House Is Black · reception & legacy

1963 · Forugh Farrokhzad

How The House Is Black has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A 22-minute documentary that screened at Oberhausen in the early '60s and then circulated mostly by reputation for decades, it's since been canonised as the seed of the Iranian New Wave — capped by cracking the Sight & Sound critics' top 100 in 2022.

What's debated

The perennial cinephile debate: can a 22-minute documentary really be 'the greatest Iranian film,' and does Farrokhzad's poetic gaze at a leper colony transcend or trouble documentary ethics?

Its footprint

Its opening narration — that the world has no shortage of ugliness, and there would be more if we closed our eyes to it — is one of the most quoted lines in nonfiction cinema, and Iranian New Wave directors including Kiarostami have pointed to the film as foundational.

Where it stands

A Letterboxd shorts darling and a 'you must see this' rite of passage — the rare short film that turns up on greatest-of-all-time lists, made by a poet who never got to make another.

★ Did you know? While shooting at the Bababaghi colony, Farrokhzad — who died in a car crash just four years later, at 32 — adopted Hossein Mansouri, the child of two residents; he grew up to become a poet and translator of her work in Germany.