A film restoration funded by the Golden Globe Foundation has been named the number one discovery of this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival in Bologna, Italy.
‘The Sealed Soil’ directed by Marva Nabili (the second feature film directed by a woman in the history of Iranian cinema), was announced as the number one pick in an annual poll curated by filmmaker and programmer Ehsan Khoshbakht.
The restored film premiered at UCLA Film & Television Archive on June 15th and a week later at Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato.
Il Cinema Ritrovato is an annual film festival organized every summer by Cineteca di Bologna in Italy and dedicated to the history of cinema, screening film classics and retrospectives, and showcasing the latest restored works from cinematographic archives and film laboratories around the world.
The Sealed Soil (Khake sar beh mohr)
Marva Nabili (Iran 1976)
“18-year-old Rooey-Bekheir, who lives in the countryside, is to be married; however, she has already turned down several candidates. With her quiet but stubborn resistance, she disturbs those around her. Amidst the insistence on old customs, traditional village life is nevertheless subject to change. A modern settlement being built on the other side of the road heralds new possibilities. With deliberately sparse means, sparingly used dialogue, long, motionless shots and in images that are as precise as they are distant, Nabili conveys the monotony and lack of alternatives in her protagonist’s life as well as her striving for independence. ‘I tried to use Brecht’s concept of the alienation effect in a purely cinematic way and not simply transfer a theatrical version of his methods to the film. To achieve this cinematic form, I used the aesthetics of Persian miniature painting.’ (Marva Nabili)
The Sealed Soil was shot with a small crew and amateur actors in a village in southern Iran. Nabili brought the negatives with the rough cut in a suitcase to the USA, where she finished the film. To date, the film has not been shown in Iran.» (Kino Arsenal Berlin, December 2022)
