Silent film gets new life from a qeychak

AN ALMOST century-old silent masterpiece of documentary filmmaking will be given new life next month when an acclaimed singer performs a “sound-track”.

Grass, made in 1925, recounts the yearly migration of 50,000 tribespeople into Iran, taking 500,000 animals across fierce wide rivers and snowy peaks to fresh pasture. The trek has been going on for a thousand years.

The film will be shown at the Castlemaine Documentary Festival, which runs from June 16 to 18, with the music by ZOJ, a Ballarat duo comprising acclaimed singer Gelareh Pour and her partner on drums, Brian O’Dwyer.

Festival director Claire Jager found ZOJ, which is modern Persian for couple, through a computer search for Iranian musicians in Central Victoria who might compose an original score. To Jager’s knowledge, such a silent film-live music collaboration has not been done before.

Born in Iran, Gelareh is a singer and songwriter, who also plays a bowed lute called a qeychak. She has performed in Iran, Tajikistan and across Europe. In Australia she has appeared at festivals and venues across the country, collaborating with leading innovative musicians as well as producing three albums.

So how did all this come about? “Inadvertently,” says director Jager. “A Turkish woman got in touch with me to suggest a festival of Iranian films, which led to Grass.” Another happy coincidence: it will be shown during Refugee Week.

It is one of the first films to study a culture. Jager says she knew of it through her 30 years in the field of documentaries and was able to track down a new print in the US.

Under its full title, Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, the documentary was chosen for preservation by the American Library of Congress as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”.

Another reason for Grass having such fame is that Merian C. Cooper, one of its three directors and producers went on to make the classic King Kong

Another producer was Marguerite Harrison, who also worked as a reporter and translator as well as spying for the US in Japan and the Soviet Union in the 1920s. She was held for 10 months in the notorious Lubyanka prison.

She first met Cooper at a ball in Warsaw during the early days of the war between Russia and Poland, giving him food, blankets and books when the Russians jailed him in 1920.

By contrast, another documentary takes the viewer into the world of descendants of camel drivers in Australia, commonly called Afghans, although most were from the far west of British India, including today’s Pakistan. Others came from Egypt and Turkiye.

Watandar, My Countryman centres on an effort by a descendant of the cameleers, Muzafar Ali, to film them to try to understand his new Afghan-Australian identity. It is directed, written, and produced by Jolyon Hoff who, like Ali, lives in Indonesia. Journeying far from his favourite surfing beaches, Hoff undertook a type of road trip looking for the cameleers and filming Ali on his mission.

Another festival highlight is Weed & Wine, described by Jager as an intriguing account of a French family with centuries-old vineyards and a son who runs a staterecognised cannabis farm in California.

And this year C-Doc introduces a second venue - The Yurt - a beautiful microcinema located in easy walking distance to the Theatre Royal. The Yurt features an alternative program of family-friendly sessions across the Saturday and Sunday mornings and enticing programs for young people in the afternoons and evenings. It will also host an immersive interactive parlour game, Werewolves, for more daring festival-goers.

Link and tickets: www.cdocff.com.au

Words: Kevin Childs | Images: Contributed & Katrina Penning (centre)