The House Is Black

Director: Forough Farrokhzad
Iran, 1962, 20', HDD, b&w
Persian with Turkish subtitles 

For the first time in Turkey, at Pera Film with its restored copy!

This documentary short, the only film made by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, is one of the very first film essays and qualifies as a precursor to the Iranian New Wave. The House Is Black captures life in the Baba Baghi leper colony, a small village where the inhabitants live from day to day. They go to the market, eat, knit, smoke and play board games. Meanwhile, the children go to school. Some of them are visibly affected by the disease while others look healthy—for now, at least. Farrokhzad’s voice-over provides the images with poetic commentary in which she mixes texts from the Bible and the Koran with her own poetry. A succession of attentive black-and-white shots endows the deformities with their own beauty and melds together daily moments of pain, despair, warmth and joy into a profoundly human document.

The House Is Black

The House Is Black

Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers

Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers

The Diaspora Suite - Forged Ways

The Diaspora Suite - Forged Ways

The Diaspora Suite - American Hunger

The Diaspora Suite - American Hunger

The Diaspora Suite - Many Thousands Gone

The Diaspora Suite - Many Thousands Gone

The Diaspora Suite - Kindah

The Diaspora Suite - Kindah

The Diaspora Suite - Fluid Frontiers

The Diaspora Suite - Fluid Frontiers

Symbols

Symbols

Pera Museum’s Cold Front from the Balkans exhibition curated by Ali Akay and Alenka Gregorič brings together contemporary artists from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia.

İstanbul: Before & After

İstanbul: Before & After

Selected from the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Photography Collection, we present the landscapes and places in Istanbul photographs, dating from the 1850s to the 1980s, together with their present-day views!

Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico was born on July 10, 1888, in Volos, Greece, to an Italian family. His mother, Gemma Cervetto, was from a family of Genoa origin, but most likely she was born in Izmir. His father, Evaristo, was born on June 21, 1841 in the Büyükdere district of Istanbul.