Voices of Bam

It was one of the greatest media-genic natural disasters in our time: the earthquake that razed the historic mediaeval city of Bam in Iran in 2003. After the news teams left, an Iranian art historian started digging up family photos from the rubble, in order to give the traumatised population its private history back. As archaeologists focus on the tombs and rubbish dumps of antiquity, so the art historian searched the filing cabinets of photography shops buried under the rubble. In Voices of Bam, several of these recovered photographs form the starting point for poetic portraits of people who are trying to give their life some new meaning. The film does two things at the same time: it provides a picture of everyday life before the disaster, but simultaneously records how the survivors are scrambling back up the ladder. The film also unintentionally came about in a special way. At the last moment, while her crew had already arrived in Bam, it became apparent that the director had no permission from the Iranian authorities to enter the country. As if in a flight simulator, she had to navigate her film from a distance, trusting that her crew would find the poetry she was looking for. We shall never know if the result would have been better with the film maker on the spot, but it’s difficult to imagine. (GjZ)