“Silent House”, the intimate Iranian saga of a house and a family in Tehran

Nassrin, the mother of Iranian directors Farnaz and Mohammadreza Jurabchian, in the family home in Tehran.

“Silent House”, presented at Fipadoc 2023. © Fipadoc 2023

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

6 mins

It is wonderfully relevant to tell the diary of a house in Tehran for a century in the form of a documentary, but it is obviously also an approach that worries the Iranian authorities.

"Silent House" has just been distinguished at the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival in Biarritz (Fipadoc) with the Mitrani Prize, but Iranian directors Farnaz and Mohammadreza Jurabchian have been banned from leaving Iran to attend the screening of their film . 

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The Mitrani Prize rewards the best first or second film in the international competitions of Fipadoc, so it transcends genres, formats and themes and is open to unexpected experiences.

This year, the jury rewarded a film full of enigmas and different strata.

(“Silent House”) turns out to be a visual project that is both incongruous and capable of rinsing our eyes from the images known so far through Iranian films screened in international festivals.  

The portrait of an Iranian family over four generations

Silent House

portrays an Iranian family spanning four generations, filmed from inside the family unit.

A century told through private archives and a unique family home in many ways.

First, it is the house inhabited by the family of directors, Farnaz and Mohammadreza Jurabchian, sister and brother.

This impressive and luxurious architect's house was acquired by their wealthy grandfather from the hand of Esmat Dowlatshahi, fourth and last wife of Reza Chah.

According to legend, it was in this house that a secret meeting of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt took place, during the Tehran conference in 1943.  

This mansion is all the more emblematic as it keeps within its walls of course more secrets than the documentary reveals.

The comment does explain that the house is located next to Tehran's largest palace, Saadabad Palace.

But he does not tell us that the latter now houses the official residence of the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, while mentioning the fact that it is forbidden " 

 ".

In the same way, the sartorial counter-revolution is lived naturally by the images, without insisting on the fact that Reza Chah was the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty having prohibited the wearing of the veil for women and obliged men to dress " western”. 

Family archives and the imagination of spectators

Everything is shown, but few things are explicitly explained in the documentary.

At the same time, the family and official archives selected are likely to quintuple the imagination of the spectators around the events that have taken place in Iran since the Islamic revolution.

Each spectator, according to his knowledge and his will, is free to see what he wants in these unformatted images.

Because the originality of the scenes filmed lies in the fact that the grandfather had bought a camera very early on, thus creating a family tradition of filming the house and the family circle in an exhaustive way.

His descendants were thus able to draw on the family archives to reconstruct the family history over a century.

Always keeping in mind the leitmotif advocated by the grandfather: " 

 We, the spectators, therefore look at unpublished, intimate and meaningful images, which are however often fabricated without a specific purpose, thus avoiding the elicitation of prefabricated responses… 

Do the directors simply invite us to watch the fortunes and misfortunes of their family over a century?

Are we witnessing the genealogy of a decline?

Is this the chronology of an announced decline of a house?

The story of a family drama or a couple?

A company photo album?

The cinematographic mirror of a religion in power?

The fragmented history of a country's destiny? 

From Khomeini to the Depression

A multitude of stories overlap in this silent house.

There's the best-selling novel about a grandfather born poor who becomes a wealthy businessman.

An upstart who marries the daughter of one of the most religious and wealthy families in the country, and ends up residing with his family and six children for a year in the same house as the emperor's last wife.

The marriage of the parents in suits and ties and wedding dresses in 1976 is as well documented as the wearing of the veil by the grandmother during the ban on the veil in 1936.

The archives are also full of spectacular images.

In 1979, the rushes found show the Islamic revolution acclaimed by the population taking to the streets, but also by the directors' mother who poses proudly in uniform.

She literally breathes revolution through images showing the crowd, the armed youth, the people on the move: “Khomeini is our leader!

Then comes the painful awakening, with the house confiscated by the revolutionaries and the obligation to ruin themselves by buying it a second time.

Slowly also emerges the story of Uncle Mohammad, who, like many family friends, sought his happiness in the West, before returning to the country and home, after forty years in exile, with a deep depression.  

The film encapsulates a century where the house seems to be falling apart at the same rate as the moral state and the financial health of the country around... All punctuated also by images of happiness, birthday parties, family reunions, Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, thus displaying a certain freedom kept inside this very special house, with its tennis court inside the property;

after the very early death of her husband, the mother's desire for independence goes through the opening of a bookstore, her candidacy for the presidential election, studies in psychology... At the same time, we will witness the devastation caused by the Iran-Iraq war within the family, car footage showing unrest caused by presidential elections denounced by some as rigged,

The images come out, the directors stay in Iran

Inevitably, the history of the family merges with that of the country.

Unlike the country's authorities, the house will remain silent in the face of the images, even in the face of CCTV cameras which now track movement inside the property.

Invited to attend the screening of their documentary at the very prestigious documentary film festivals in Amsterdam (Idfa) and Biarritz (Fipadoc) last November and January, directors Mohammadreza and Farnaz Jurabchian did not obtain permission from get out of Iran.

Although they have already obtained visas and Farnaz also has a Canadian passport.

Since the uprising in Iran in September 2022, in response to the death of Mahsa Amini after his arrest by the vice police, 

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