Margins of the funeral ceremony of Reza Davodenjad


Parviz Kimiavi’s 1973 film The Mongols is a collage of disparate images, sounds, and narrative components that come at the audience like a whirlwind. Produced by National Iranian Radio and Television, The Mongols revolves around various forms of “unearthing,” of old artifacts buried in the soil, of old medieval texts, of fragments of history (writing), of moving images from cinema technology, even its prehistory, and of the “new media” of the time, the television. There are two main characters in the film, a young filmmaker for the national television network (played by Kimiavi himself) and his wife (played by the late Fahimeh Rastkar), who is completing her doctoral research on the Mongol invasion of medieval Persia.