BONJOUR MONSIEUR GHAFFARI

Screening November 19th, 7:00pm Bounjour Monsieur Ghafari paints a portrait of the life and experiences of Farrokh Ghafari the veteran Iranian film critic, the founder of Iranian Film Archive and one of the forerunners of the Iranian New Wave Cinema in the early 60s. Ghafari was a familiar figure not only to Iranian cinephiles, but to French film society whether as a film critic writing for the “Positive” film magazine or working with Henri Langlois in running the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris in the early 1950s. In this film we see Ghafari talking passionately about his first encounters with cinema, his life and his arrival as a stranger in Paris at the age of 11, fascinated by silent films of the time and grow up parallel to the development of cinema in France and around the world, and the events leading to his exile and eventual death away from home all in his own words.