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A deeply personal portrait becomes a reflection on Iran’s turbulent political history in this striking, formally innovative memoir from one of the nation’s most acclaimed female filmmakers.
In what she has dubbed “a project of a lifetime”, Iranian auteur Firouzeh Khosrovani turns her documentary lens on her family, picking up in Tehran in the 1960s when her Islamic mother literally married a photograph of her secular father, who was studying radiology abroad in Switzerland.
Through archival material, still images and letters, Khosrovani reveals how this family history becomes an uncanny mirror of their homeland’s tumultuous political events, pivoting her parents’ relationship around the 1979 Iranian Revolution to explore the exchange of power between her religious, conservative mother and progressive father. Winner of Best Feature-Length Documentary at IDFA 2020, this cine-memoir is a powerful fusion of personal catharsis and avant-garde style, and a revealing feminist perspective on Iran’s troubled past.
“Radiography of a Family may be the best family memoir documentary since Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell … Thoroughly engrossing [and] painfully personal.” – Film Inquiry