The House is Black

The House is Black is a short film full of both moral and poetic messages. It defines what beauty and normalcy are in regards to the lepers. The film shows that just because all of the people presented have deformities that doesn't mean they're any different from other people. They still live as normal lives as possible. The children still play, the adults pray daily, and the women still get married and have children. Women even wear makeup and still dress up despite they're different appearance. Beauty and normalcy are things that all people experience regardless of their situations.

The moral aspects of the film were shown through the shifts in the narrator, where a man would be describing leprosy. It presented that leprosy may be a disease, but those who are still effected by it are still people and they should not be treated like animals. By being sent to colonies, the world was basically saying that they were no different than diseased livestock, they just couldn’t kill them. Farrokhzad's way of filming this showed the cruel aspect of the leper colony lifestyle, as opposed to the carefree one shown previously. The sporadic shifts between scenes gave the film a horror-like appearance. Bringing attention back to the serious nature of leprosy and that people should be aware that it is a disease that exists. By creating specific colonies for leprosy alone, it was like saying that it was a problem the world could just turn a blind eye to.

By looking at Farrokhzad's poems a viewer, can find the greater depth in her movie. Most of her poems, though on topics that differ from leprosy, revert back to the same topic: beauty. She finds beauty in everything from the waves of the ocean to the eyes of her lovers. They all demonstrate a sort of appreciation for the simpler things in life, which can relate back to the film. Everyday tasks in the colony present the people as regular and not out casted to a colony. Just by revealing what their everyday lives consist of, the film provides a better understanding of the colony and its people. It shows that the people of the colony actually were human and should have been treated as such.  

Beauty takes on many different definitions, but can be found everywhere. The House is Black as well as the book Sin by Forugh Farrokhzad  both express the beauty in the most unexpected places as well as the horrors. The film shows the normalcy that a colony of lepers is capable of despite their diseases. It also showed the problems with how they were being treated, almost like a herd of cattle. Farrokhzad also explained in her poems the beauty in nature and humans. The horrors that she presented were also of simpler things such as a wedding band or the death of nature. All of Farrokhzad's works can be viewed with a sort of interconnectedness.