TEHRAN – The restored version of “The Sealed Soil,” a 1977 Iranian film directed by Marva Nabili, will be shown at the cinematheque of the Iranian Artists Forum (IAF) in Tehran on Monday.

The 90-minute film is scheduled to be screened at the Nasseri Hall of the IAF at 5 p.m. and will be followed by a review session in the presence of the movie critic Shahram Ashraf Abyaneh, Mehr reported.

The second feature film made by a female director in Iran, “The Sealed Soil” traces the passive revolt of a young girl who resists to forced marriage, a transformation that can be seen as a metaphor for Iran's transition from tradition to modernity.

In pre-revolution Iran, a village girl's rejection of marriage leads her family to believe she's possessed, prompting them to consult an exorcist.

The film was shot without sound. Nabili later added dubbing and sound effects. “The Sealed Soil” met with international critical acclaim, notably winning an award at the London Film Festival in 1977. 

The earliest surviving Iranian film directed by a woman, Nabili’s astonishing debut is a deftly observant and sensually attuned work that conjures the everyday plight of the female subject under the stifling patriarchy of village life in southwestern Iran.

The film follows Roo-Bekheir, a woman living in a remote village of Ghalleh Noo-Asgar, who must prepare to move to accommodate a state-ordered construction project. We watch as she goes about her everyday routine, a life structured as much by repetitiveness as by social repression. 

Evoking Akerman and Bresson through its uncompromising rigor, yet marked by its own brand of low-key sensuality, “The Sealed Soil” is shot through with criticality and an attentiveness to the inner world of a woman rebelling, in her way, against stifling patriarchy, as she is caught between the traditional values of her small village and her own yearnings for independence and individuality.

Breathtaking in its directorial sophistication and restraint and unblinking in its critique of institutionalized misogyny, this too-long-underseen masterstroke of world cinema stands alongside Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman” both in its formal rigor and its quietly radical vision of female rebellion.

Born in Iran in 1941, Marva Nabili studied painting at the University of Decorative Arts in Tehran, where she met filmmaker Fereydoun Rahnama. She later starred in his film “Siavash at Persepolis,” which won the Jean Epstein Award at the Locarno Film Festival. Encouraged by Rahnama, Nabili moved to London and later New York City, studying filmmaking at City University of New York and Goddard College. 

Her debut feature film “The Sealed Soil” was named Outstanding Film of the Year at the London Film Festival, and Nabili received the Best New Director Award at Mostra Internazionale del Film d’Autore, Sanremo. Her film “Nightsongs,” which chronicles the lives of a Chinese immigrant family living in New York City, was one of the first screenplays developed through Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute and was later produced by the PBS series American Playhouse.

SS/SAB