Beyond the Fences of Lâlehzâr

A boundary-bending multimedia memory piece, Amen Feizabadi’s Beyond the Fences of Lâlehzâr revolves around a middle-aged man working in the Lâlehzâr neighbourhood of Tehran. Once known as the “Champs Elysées of Tehran” for its central place in the city’s public and cultural life, Lâlehzâr devolved into a hub of lighting and electrical supplies, with its theatres and cinemas gradually shutting down after the Iranian Revolution.

Prompted by a faceless woman who confronts him about his childhood, the man takes a trip through the labyrinth of his memory. This abstract journey unfolds in an abandoned theatre in Lâlehzâr with peeling walls pierced by shafts of light. As a blindfolded string quartet plays atonal pieces and moving images are projected across a wall, the man remembers a cherished girl of his childhood who loved music, dance and poetry and whose free spirit was quashed by the collusion of their domineering fathers.

Feizabadi’s uncompromising film interweaves experimental music, theatre and dance in its elliptical exploration of the treacheries of memory, obscuring the divide between past and present, reality and fiction, and dream and waking state. In allegorising a society in which music and poetry have been silenced, Beyond the Fences of Lâlehzâr crafts an oblique, hypnotic elegy for freedom and art.

– Srikanth Srinivasan