In Collaboration with Abu Dhabi Film Festival
Inspired by U.S. reporter, spy, and geographer Marguerite Harrison's accounts of Persia, Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life sensationalizes the biannual migration of 50,000 Bakhtiari nomads and their 500,000 animals over mountains and rivers, across deserts and snow, in search of green pastures. Although orientalism frames the Bakhtiari as noble, primitive, and unchanging—and their migration as an exotic journey—the film's images offer archival traces of remote Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. (USA 1925; black-and-white; English intertitles;
75 minutes; dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack)
The short film
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (USA 1906; black-and-white;
7 minutes; dir. Edwin S. Porter) will open the screening.
