TEHRAN – The third session of the “Film Studies” program, focusing on “The Tenants” directed by the late filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui, will be held at the Iranian Artists Forum in Tehran on Thursday.

“The Tenants” is a 1987 comedy film, which has been widely acclaimed as the best Iranian comedy film of the 1980s, Honaronline reported.

The film is about the tenants of a rundown building on the outskirts of Tehran, with no legal heir, who face major housing problems to deal with: major repairs and the threat of eviction by a greedy building manager who wants to own the building.

Set almost entirely in a residential building on the outskirts of Tehran, a number of tenants encounter a series of problems with their homes. The owner of the building, Abbas, however, is careless, refusing to maintain the property. 

What begins as a few leaks and cracks here and there escalates into a matter of life and death as the tenants struggle to deal with setback after setback. Things are complicated further by a dispute regarding the building's heir, engineered in part by the conniving Gholam. A dramatic portrayal of domestic chaos.

During the session, veteran director, actor, and researcher Dariush Moaddabian will speak on “Techniques of Comedy and ‘The Tenants’,” director, screenwriter, and researcher Ali Rouhani will deliver a speech on “’The Tenants’ and the Critique of Ideology: A Symptomatic Reading,” psychiatrist Mojtaba Arham Sadr and psychologist Behnam Hosseini will speak about “’The Tenants’: A Psychoanalytic/Sociological Reflection of Contemporary Iranian Bourgeois Manners,” and researcher Masih Norouzi will talk about “The Wilderness of Historical Perspective in the Iranian Intellectual Tradition”.

In the second part of the session, a discussion about the film will take place with the participation of the veteran actor Iraj Rad, editor Hossein Heydari, and film critic Amirhossein Babaei.

SS/SAB