Tall Shadows Of The Wind

Bahman Farmanara's The Long Shadows of the Wind, now in post-production stages. Based on a script by the young novelist Houshang Golshiri (author of Prince Ehtejab), it is a half-mystic, half-sociologic study of a group of superstitious villagers awed and spellbound by the presence of a gigantic scarecrow in their region. One hopes that Farmanara will once again succeed in interweaving the threads of psychology, tribal history and social comment into the same coherent whole that made Prince Ehtejab a critical success.

Tall Shadows if the Wind 

Sayehaye Bolande Bad

Bahman Farmanara, Iran. 1979; 110m

“Bahman Farmanra’s symbolic indictment of dictatorship is both daring provocative. Farmanara builds his indictment around a simple parable: the people of a remote Iranian village, while praying to their God to send them a liberator, erect scarecrows for their protection. Ironically, however, the scarecrows soon start terrorizing them. The film seems to suggests that dictators are born out of an oppressed people’s search for ‘liberators,” and that liberators often turn against the very people who crated them….Since Tall Shadows of the Wind was made one year before the revolution, the central metaphor of the scarecrow was meant to represent the Shah’s dictatorship. Yet, viewing the film after the revolution, reminds one of the Khomeini’s rise to power…”__ Jamshid Akrami, in Film and Politics in the Third World .