The House Is Black

A raw, poetic excursion by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad into a leper colony. Unembellished images of physical deformity, accompanied by an encyclopaedic list of facts about the illness, contrast sharply with the filmmaker’s sensitive poems in search of the limits of human suffering. A bitter ballad about the will to live and the beauty of life under all circumstances.
“Will you tell me something ugly that you know?”, the teacher asks the leprous children in her class. “Arm, leg… head…”, they answer without thinking twice, and laugh at themselves. (Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival)