Directed by Bahram Beyzaie • 1972 • Iran
Starring Parviz Fannizadeh, Parvaneh Massoumi, Manuchehr Farid
With brash stylistic exuberance, this first feature from Bahram Beyzaie helped usher in the Iranian New Wave. When he takes a job as a schoolteacher in a new neighborhood, the hapless intellectual Mr. Hekmati finds that he is a fish out of water. Shot in luminous monochrome and edited with quicksilver invention, DOWNPOUR, which has been painstakingly restored from the only known surviving print, captures with puckish humor and great tenderness the cultural conflicts coursing through Iran at a pivotal historical moment.
Up Next in 30 Years of The Film Foundation
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Insiang
Directed by Lino Brocka • 1976 • Philippines
Jealousy and violence take center stage in this claustrophobic melodrama, a tautly constructed character study set in the slums of Manila. Lino Brocka crafts an eviscerating portrait of an innocent daughter and her bitter mother as women scorned. In...
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The Tree of Wooden Clogs
Directed by Ermanno Olmi • 1978 • Italy
Starring Luigi Ornaghi, Francesca Moriggi, Omar BrignoliA painterly and sensual immersion in late nineteenth-century Italian farm life, Ermanno Olmi’s THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS lovingly focuses on four families working for one landowner on an isolated e...
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Audience
Directed by Barbara Hammer • 1982 • United States
An incredible document of the LGBT film scene in the early 1980s (as well as artist Barbara Hammer’s off-the-charts charisma), AUDIENCE finds Hammer working in a more straightforward documentary mode than usual. Hammer interviews her largely lesb...
