Nightsongs

Siyavosh at Persepolis tells the story of the Crown Prince of Iran, Siyavosh, who after a falling-out with his father leaves Iran and settles in Turan. There he marries the daughter of King Afrasyab and is killed in a plot by the king’s scheming and jealous son. The film combines this ancient story with documentary-style scenes of foreign tourists visiting the ruins of Persepolis in the present, creating a work in which past, future, present, legend, theater and a myriad of filmic forms are combined in a dense intertextuality.

A young woman in pre-revolution Iran is caught between the traditional values of her small village and her own yearnings for independence and individuality. Her persistent refusal of marriage proposals coupled with her unseemly removal of her hood causes her family to seek the help of an exorcist, convinced she must be possessed by evil spirits. Made surreptitiously in 1977 just as the Ayatollah Khomeini regime was coming to power, a rough cut of ‘The Sealed Soil” was smuggled out of Iran by the director in a false-bottomed suitcase, and taken to the U.S., where she completed her final cut. The film has never been seen in Iran.

American Playhouse is an anthology television series periodically broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.