Postscript

The drowned footage recovered from the Karaj Dam in Iran – where French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse crashed in 1970 – resurfaces. During a phone conversation, an Iranian archivist, speculates on Lamorisse’s death and the restoration and circulation of his final images.

We know Albert Lamorisse for his red balloon floating in the Parisian sky, yet we know less about how he was finally caught out by gravity. Invited in 1968 by the Shah to make a film glorifying the history and flourishing development of Iran, the French filmmaker died two years later during a helicopter shoot that he wanted to make into the narrational throughline of The Lovers’ Wind, or in the Farsi version, Bād-e Sabā, after the name of a northeast wind, perhaps the one that hastened his crash. Shedding light on this story, the work of Parastoo and Faraz Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko first materialised as a multi-channel video installation in 2024 at the Mercer Union in Toronto. While Lovers’ Wind restaged and manoeuvred elements from the original film and its author’s life – particularly, another forgotten fact, that he was the inventor of Risk, a boardgame of conquest – to assess his legacy and give new meaning to his fragments. Postscript combines a phone conversation between Faraz Anoushahpour and a curator from the Iranian National Film Archive with the last images filmed by Lamorisse, supposedly recovered from the wreck. During a conversation whose tone shifts from interrogation to investigation and speculation, the anonymous interlocutor cites her different sources, describes the diverse versions and twists and turns, methodically points up their ecosystem, so effectively that the document seems to fall apart in the historical and symbolic network that it ignites.

Antoine Thirion