Kamran Shirdel is considered one of Iran's most influential documentary filmmakers.Women's Prison (1966), Tehran is the Capital of Iran (started in 1966, but finished in 1980), The Red Light District (1967-80) and The Night It Rained (1967) are among his most well-known films made during the Pahlavi era. Throughout the 70s and 80s, he directed a substantial number of commissioned industrial documentaries, many of them now considered as the classics of their genre in Iran, for their lyricism, abstraction, and irony.
Amir Naderi, now living in New York for more than two decades, has directed some of the most celebrated films in the history of Iranian cinema. After a number of years of working in the film industry as a still photographer, he made his feature debut Goodbye Friend in 1970, and in 1971 The Dead-end. Shot in stark black and white, these two films offered shockingly dark images of the urban sprawl that is the capital of Iran. The Runner made in 1984 became the first film from the post-revolutionary Iran to gain international acclaim. In 1993 Naderi made Manhattan by Numbers, his first film after moving to New York.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. After finishing his first college degree at the University of Tehran he moved to the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber's theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff, the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time. He engages with Iranian cinema by not only placing specific filmic texts within the larger socio-political context, and the Iranian intellectual history, but also by opening them to other artistic modes such as Persian poetry and fiction.
Free and open to the public.
This event is sponsored by Columbia's Middle East Institute, MESAAS, and School of the Arts (FILM).
