Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine

In 1976 the Rotterdam film festival presented Prince Ehtejab by the Iranian film-maker Bahman Farmanara. After the film-maker was prevented from making a film in Iran for twenty years (he lived abroad for years), we can now present Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine, a surprisingly light-hearted meditation on death.The film is very autobiographical. Farmanara himself plays the captivating role of the director Bahman Farjami who is making a documentary about Iranian funeral rites for Japanese TV after not having made any films for twenty years. However death pursues him, also on a personal level. Several good friends, among them, Sohrab S. Saless, another Iranian master in exile, die one after the other and he himself also has heart trouble. In the graveyard, he is stunned to see that the place he has reserved alongside his dead wife has already been occupied. Then Farjami is caught by other unpleasant quirks of fate. In the end he takes matters into his own hands: he decides to direct his own death.The film does not have a traditional narrative line. The director allows each event to tell its own story using a variety of stylistic means, such as a division into chapters and a documentary-like explanation about funeral rituals. Farmanara was given seven awards at the Tehran Film Festival for his intelligent and wise film and a Special Jury Prize in Montreal.