Silent House

The story of three generations of an Iranian family brought up in a 100-year-old house in Tehran that has born witness to turbulent familial and societal changes.

Through a mix of Super 8 home movies, archive images, and present-day footage, sibling filmmakers, Farnaz and Mohammadreza Jurabchian portray their family’s cinematic evolution across the last century entangled with the tides of their country’s complicated cultural, social and political history. With the house as a silent witness, the family’s story becomes a mirror for society and the house a metaphor for Iran.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion about the uses of archival footage and home movies in contemporary filmmaking.

The panelists

Jon Davies, Home Movie Archivist for the Cinema Museum. A historian and film editor specialising in French Cinema, Jon has catalogued the museum’ extensive collection of home movies that offer up so much to our understanding of the past and social history in particular.

Shane O’Sullivan, documentary filmmaker, author and Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Film and Photography at Kingston School of Art. Shane is the UK Principal Investigator on the award-winning AHRC-funded Make Film History project, supported by the BFI, BBC Archive, Northern Ireland Screen and the Irish Film Institute. The project opens up the archives to young filmmakers across the UK and Ireland.

Lucy Peters – film programmer and curator researching and exhibiting experimental/female directed cinema. Her most recent work ‘Female Rebels of the Avant-Garde’ was presented at the BFI Southbank and the University of Sussex, alongside curational projects at Genesis Cinema and screenings from her independent exhibition initiative Electric Blue Cinema. In January, Lucy curated the archival programme All We Have of the House for London Short Film Festival.