Ebrahim Golestan was just as imposing as his abode. Because people had described the reclusive auteur with words like irascible, fearsome, and unapproachable (some told me I was crazy to seek him out), I was nervous when I knocked on the mansion’s huge front door. But Golestan—white-haired yet physically robust—opened it and welcomed me warmly. Over the next two hours, I discovered he was full of feisty, sometimes scathing opinions on various subjects and proud of his work. As a young man in Iran, he pursued a literary career, translating foreign authors like Hemingway, and then founded a film company and directed short documentaries, which were among the first Iranian films to go abroad and win prizes.
His first feature, “The Brick and the Mirror,” a brilliant, Antonioni-like study of urban anomie, is the most important and accomplished Iranian feature from before the eruption of the Iranian New Wave in 1969. But I was there to interview him about another film. In the ‘60s, Golestan had been lovers with Forough Farrokhzad, who is regarded as the greatest female poet in Iran’s 2,500-year history. He sent her to England to study filmmaking and later assigned her to direct a short doc about a leper colony that he produced. The result, “The House Is Black,” is widely considered the most important Iranian short film in history; its poetic style had an acknowledged influence on directors including Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf. (My interview with Golestan about the film has never been published. I intended to include it in my new book but then decided it didn’t fit.)
Since that day in the late ‘90s, I hadn’t glimpsed Golestan’s extraordinary pile until last night when I watched Mitra Farahani’s fascinating “See You Friday, Robinson.” The film, which will run December 14-20 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, comprises a set of weekly, long-distance communications between Golestan and Jean-Luc Godard, the latter at his home in Rolle, Switzerland. Filmed in 2014, the documentary is as inspired as it is unusual. An Iranian ex-pat who has made other docs about aging artists (I reviewed her “Fifi Howls from Happiness” here), Farahani was a producer on two late Godard films and thought that pairing him with Golestan was bound to produce some interesting exchanges. She was right. Since their email messages were sent on Friday, Godard proposed “See You Friday, Robinson” as a nod to Robinson Crusoe.