Radiograph of a Family

An extremely personal documentary in which Firouzeh Khosrovani intimately reveals the life and marriage of her parents, people who couldn’t be at more opposite poles regarding secularism and religious Islamic ideology. A story told through archival images, letters and conversations, in a radiography that goes beyond the particular to also illustrate conflicts at the heart of Iranian society.

Radiograph of a Family is a fine-tooth comb portrait of the eternal duality between tradition and modernity. For a woman to legally leave Iran, she couldn't make it single. So, Tayi marries the photograph of her future husband, so that she can meet him again in Switzerland. This meeting triggers an inner conflict in Tayi, which puts her values in tension with a new world, where she relearns how to live with Hossein. The ideological oppositions of Tayi and Hossein are the main stage in this family story, but Firouzeh Khosrovani also allows us an intimate portrait of what it was like to grow up in this duality and how her story functions as a mirror of a country in conflict. Firouzeh's childhood is the fruit of this dichotomy, and despite this, she does not condemn or extol. She films precisely the construction of a couple and their decline, in a gesture that, with it, carries seeds from both sides – progress, tradition, and always, resistance. In a meticulous study of family archives, the film is a unique story that uses imagery polyphony as an instrument of dialogue about contrasting territories. (Inês Lima Torres)