Beyond Black There is No Colour: The Story of Forough Farrokhzad

Forough Farrokhzad, poet, mother, feminist, radical, was one of the most iconic dissenting voices in modern Iranian history. Often referred to as Iran's Sylvia Plath - for her highly original, confessional writing style as much as her battle with depression and tragic death - she went against the grain by challenging widely held conventions in turbulent mid-twentieth-century Iran, where the forces of modernity were under siege from reactionary religious fervour. Divorced at nineteen and shorn of the right to see her son by benighted divorce laws, she spent much of her life attempting to reconcile a deep sense of personal loss through her guiding principles of artistic integrity and equality for society's outcasts. Her acclaimed documentary The House is Black - widely considered the genesis of Iranian New Wave cinema - was devoted to humanising the inhabitants of a leper community and led to the adoption of her second son Hossein from the colony itself. She died in a motor accident in 1967 aged just thirty-two. In 'Beyond Black There Is No Colour', Maryam Diener brilliantly resurrects Forough's voice to retell her story and explore the conflicting needs of family, love, emotional truth, and freedom of expression in the highly religious, misogynistic, and patriarchal Iranian society.