RABLY Movie Club — The First Night

A Club for Films, Snacks, Drinks, and Friendship

by Lily Farhadpour

During my very first month living in the small duplex house on the grounds of the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, I began thinking about how perfect the ground floor would be for small, private and friendly film nights.

It was something I had done for years in my own home in Iran: watching wonderful films that had not been widely seen and then talking about them with friends – thoughtful people, artists and writers.

Two things were missing.

The house had no television or proper screening equipment. And, more importantly, I did not yet have the right companion and collaborator to do it with.

Then Rabab Haidar arrived to begin her residency here as my housemate.

I had already seen Rabab at an event at LCB, during her own programme, where she read an excerpt from her novel and spoke about it. We already knew that we were going to become housemates. When I met her that day, I told her:

“You are exactly the person I was looking for.”

Rabab is a very good writer and poet: creative, enthusiastic and hardworking. And she is a natural-born host. Beautiful, articulate and completely at ease in front of an audience.

And that was how the idea of RABLY Movie Club—Rabab + Lily began at the WeiterSchreiben house at LCB.

Rabab also turned out to be a very good amateur graphic designer. The idea of creating a poster and giving RABLY Movie Club its own logo was hers—and it was a great idea. She immediately got to work.

I’m not much of a poster-and-logo person myself, so I wasn’t exactly the best design consultant. My son, Behrang, joined Rabab from Tehran. Emails, messages, drafts, changes, more changes – and eventually the poster and invitations were ready.

The television problem was solved too. LCB very generously agreed to lend us a monster of a mobile TV whenever we needed it.

On 26 August, we held the first RABLY Movie Club night.

For our first screening, we chose Radiograph of a Family, the award-winning autobiographical documentary by Iranian filmmaker Firouzeh Khosrovani. We also arranged for Firouzeh to join us online after the screening for a conversation.

Our guests were almost as exciting as the film and the event itself: Barbara Burckhardt and Hardy Schmitz from Ulme35, an intercultural community space in Berlin-Westend; Nader Sani from Integrationshelfer Meehr e.V., a Berlin association working with Persian- and Dari-speaking communities, and his partner Zohreh; Parastou Forouhar, an Iranian-German artist whose work often engages with political violence, memory and human rights, and her husband; Nicol from Weiter Schreiben and his wife; Nastaran Makaremi, a writer and Weiter Schreiben fellow, and her husband; and Ali Abdollahi, a translator from German and a collaborator with Weiter Schreiben, and his wife.

The popcorn was ready, the guests brought drinks, and from the beginning the atmosphere was deliberately intimate and relaxed.

Everyone mattered to us, but we particularly wanted someone from Weiter Schreiben to be there. So although we had announced the beginning of the evening for 5:30, we knew that Nicol and his wife would arrive a little later. We tried to buy some time with conversation, introductions and explanations about RABLY.

In the end, it was already after six when we started the film.

Radiograph of a Family tells the story of Khosrovani’s parents and their profoundly different worlds: a secular father and a religious mother whose marriage unfolds against the political and social transformations of modern Iran.

Through photographs, letters, family archives, reconstructed voices and the changing physical space of the family home, the film connects an intensely private history with the larger history of a country.

After the screening, the effect of the film on the guests was wonderful to watch.

Some were deeply moved, even with tears in their eyes—and this is not exactly a film designed to make you cry! Some were astonished. Some were agitated.

Then Firouzeh Khosrovani joined us online for an extended conversation.

Everyone, one by one, spoke to Firouzeh and asked her about the film.

The conversation revolved around the deeply personal origins of the film and the way the story of one family could reveal a much larger historical and social conflict.

One of the strongest parts of the discussion concerned the relationship between private life and political history. In the film, political and historical transformation does not remain outside the family home. It enters relationships, everyday habits, objects, photographs and even the physical appearance of the house itself.

We also talked about the film’s distinctive use of family photographs, letters and archival material.

Rather than functioning simply as documents of the past, these fragments become a means of reconstructing memory – a way of approaching things that have disappeared, changed or can no longer be completely recovered.

Another important subject was the cinematic form of the documentary.

The film does not tell its story simply through conventional interviews. Instead, memory, sound, photographs, objects and reconstructed scenes come together to create a space somewhere between documentary evidence and personal recollection.

This form allows the intimate history of Khosrovani’s parents to gradually open onto the political history surrounding them.

The conversation also touched on the importance of time and distance when returning to such personal material.

A family story may be lived long before it can be fully understood – or transformed into a work of art. That distance is part of what gives the film its unusual balance between intimacy and reflection.

The online conversation with the director became an essential part of the evening.

Watching such a personal film together, and then being able to speak immediately afterwards with the filmmaker herself, gave the audience a chance to move back from the finished work to the questions behind it: memory, filmmaking, family history and creative choices.

For us, the first RABLY evening confirmed the idea with which we had started the project:

A film screening does not need to be a large or formal event in order to create a meaningful exchange.

A small group, a carefully chosen film, some popcorn and enough time to stay and talk afterwards can create an experience very different from simply watching a film alone.

So the first RABLY Movie Club night was not only a screening. It was also an experiment in creating a small space for cinema, conversation and encounter.

And the experiment worked.

Thank you, LCB. And thank you, Weiter Schreiben.