Infused with an anguished but never self-indulgent sense of nostalgia, quietly poetic and occasionally ironic, Celluloid Underground tells several parallel stories and is accompanied by the unmistakeable timbre of the voice of Ehsan Khoshbakht. His rite of initiation into the world of cinephilia took place immediately after the Iranian revolution, while the regime was cannibalising the utopian dream upheld by its children. Ehsan was five when he first entered the dark of a cinema auditorium. The sight of Anthony Quinn in Richard Fleischer’s Barabbas (1961) stunned and overwhelmed him, synaesthetically conveying “the smell of Japanese pumpkin seeds, petrol, hamand pickle sandwiches, Coca-Cola, and unfiltered cigarettes”. Shortly thereafter, the acquisition of a single frame of film was enough to open his imagination and desires to infinite possibilities. Following such a solitary and intimate first encounter, his budding cinephilia soon needed to be shared with others, to be disseminated and discussed; and so we find Ehsan as a university student, running his first film society (carefully supervised by the regime) and filming their meetings. This footage alternates with images of protests in the square in Tehran: reclaiming freedom of thought is no different from demanding one’s right to see films by Bresson or Antonioni. Ehsan’s meeting with the legendary and elusive underground collector Ahmed Jorghanian and the access this gave him to neon-lit basements stacked with films and posters and smelling of vinegar changed his life for ever. “This was the MacGuffin of my life,” he says, displaying a photo of the man. “He possessed a century of Iran’s cinematic memory – but we all know that memory can be wiped.”
Celluloid, gelatin, silver – films burned or destroyed with an axe, emulsion melted – the materiality of cinema is just one of Celluloid Underground’s leitmotivs. Another is the presence of Hitchcock– a sort of protective deity overshadowing the intrigue – or Mohammad Ali Fardin, one of the undisputed masters of pre-revolutionary cinema who was disowned in the dark night of the regime. The magnificent jazz soundtrack by the German composer Ekkehard Wölk and the editing by Niyaz Saghari and Abolfazl Talooni often make you forget that Celluloid Underground is not fiction. Even if, ultimately, we wish it were.

Cecilia Cenciarelli