The story of the film Chess Of the Wind (1976) is the story of three generations, spanning Iran and the diaspora. It’s the story of two films, banned by both the royalist and religious regimes in Iran. And it’s the story of a soundtrack that brought together musicians from across five countries.
Filmed and recorded during the pre-revolutionary period in Iran, Mohammad Reza Aslani’s Chess of the Wind is a masterpiece of world cinema, one that was retrieved from the depths of obscurity in 2014 and restored by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation to be presented to the world in 2024 in its almost full length. The film’s poetic visuals—its intimate focus on the movements of hands, and the careful artistic orchestration of each object within the frame, are all accompanied by an equally odic, labyrinthine, and tender soundtrack composed by one of Iran’s most prominent female composers and educators, Sheida Gharachedaghi.
The film’s recovery is largely thanks to the curiosity and diligence of esteemed film scholar Gita Aslani Shahrestani, the daughter of Aslani. “When I started studying for my master’s degree in Paris in 2009 or 2010, I worked on the history of Iranian cinema,” she says. “I grew up in an artistic family, and I saw how my father’s films were rather unfavorably perceived within the wider artistic community. I was aware of my father and his friends’ cinema. There was Arby Ovanessian, who made only two feature films, but no one wanted to talk about his cinema; there was Fereydoun Rahnema. Very few people wanted to talk about their work. I focused my MA and PhD on their work, and then [I discovered] that their films were nowhere to be found.”
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There were, however, poor-quality VHS tapes of the films in circulation, and one day Shahrestani came across a copy of Chess of the Wind with a 50-minute runtime. Knowing that feature films are usually double that length—along with the fact that the story was incomprehensible—Shahrestani realized that the film had been cut, and scenes that would have been deemed unacceptable in the Islamic Republic were censored. Eventually, she managed to obtain three negatives: A censored version, and two other versions that don’t contain the washer women—characters who appear repeatedly throughout the film as a visual chorus, washing laundry by the fountain in front of a mansion while engaging in conversation about the corruption around them.
“I tried to look up where the film was developed for color, and there was a studio called Badii,” Shahrestani says. “But after the digital era, they had to close, and they threw all their films away. There was a foundation after the revolution called the Foundation For The Poor People (In Farsi, “Bonyad-e Mostazafan va Janbazan”) and they kept all objects related to the Pehlevi family, such as items and decorations from houses. And since the film was produced by the Film Industry Development Corporation of Iran (FIDCI), the objects from the films were deposited in a souq outside of Tehran to be sold. In 2000, they opened the doors and started selling or renting these objects which were considered antiques.” (It is worth noting that the film is set at the end of the Qajar dynasty, who had ruled Iran since 1789.)
“Once, by mere coincidence, my brother [Amin Aslani, also an established filmmaker—ed.] wanted to make his own film. He went to that market, which was in the outskirts of Tehran, to find things for his own film. And there, at the end of one corner of the souq—after hours of sifting through materials—he saw a curtain, and behind the curtain, he saw reels. On them were the names of some of the best Iranian filmmakers, and included both the negatives and positives. At the end of the pile, he saw The Chess of The Wind. He bought all of them for dirt cheap, as the person selling them had no idea of their value.”
Amin Aslani shared the positives for The Chess of the Wind with Mohammed Reda Aslani in 2012 or 2013, at a time of cultural and political turmoil in Iran. They decided to send the reels to Shahrestani, who was in Paris; through her personal connections she reached out to the Cinematheque du Paris and the Film Foundation to work on a film restoration. There were copyrights to clarify and clear—while Bahman Faramanra was the executive producer, all the rights belonged to Mehdi Bouchehri—but the lineage of rightsholders is notoriously tangled not only in Iran, but also in most of West Asia and North Africa, so it took several years to get it all sorted. What emerged in the end was a film that was strikingly ahead of its time, one that surrounded the intellectual and historical lens of what was happening in Iran at the time with feminist framing.
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Chess of the Wind opens with percussive sounds, alternating with the horn sounds of the shyepoor (an old Iranian trumpet-like instrument). Over a blank screen, a male voice talks of death and graves, reading Surat At-Takathur from the Q’uran: “Competition in increasing worldly gains diverts you. Until you visit the graveyards.” The introduction sets the scene for the story to come, alluding to the role of religion in Iranian society since the 7th century. Soon, the sound of smashing glass damjams (etymologically derived from Persian damghan, and dating to one of Iran’s oldest civilizations, these artistic glass vessels were made to keep wine) by Fakhri Khorvash—starring in the main role as the wheelchair bound “little lady” (Lady Aghdas)—who’s exercising her own form of power over the small belongings within her realm after the death of her mother, the matriarch who owned the mansion.
The film moves on to a meeting of men, signing seemingly important documents and maps with elaborate seals, while reciting words from the Q’uran. The scenes allude to several historical moments. The likeness of one character to king Reza Pahlavi, who died (or was killed) after a visit from two religious figures, is not coincidental. And the battle between various elements of Iranian culture, like religion, with the notion of women’s liberation is manifested in characters like the religious stepfather, who is killed with a single strike on the head while praying near Khorvash’s character. Khorvash’s wheelchair becomes also a site of love and joy, as she and her maid, portrayed by the legendary Shohreh Aghdashloo, embrace and unleash an open display of passion in front of the camera.
“My father is very sensitive to sound,” Shahrestani says, “and so he used sounds in his film as part of the narration. While working on The Chess of The Wind he wanted to have the trumpet of Rafael—otherwise known as sour Esrafil in Persian—to announce the encroaching events. This is when he approached Sheida Gharachedaghi to compose the music for the film.”
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Chess of the Wind Mississippi Records
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Vinyl LP
Gharachedaghi had studied in Austria, where she wrote music marked by classical, atonal, and folkloric influences. Working together, Aslani and Gharachedaghi would select instruments, and then Gharachedaghi would create the compositions. The songs feature santur, oud, and trumpet, grounding the soundtrack’s musical language in the Eastern canon. Some songs also feature sinj (sambal), a folk membranophone instrument from the south of Iran, accompanied by southern Iranian drums, with a hint of influences from Bushehr. Gharachedaghi’s careful weaving of multiple musical strands made the whole soundtrack more alluring. “The sound and music were very special,” says Shahrestani, “because sounds are usually exaggerated in Iranian film.” Unlike the sonically oversaturated films of his generation, Aslani’s films took a minimalist approach. “There are very few sounds, but they are very intelligently and consciously placed to be 100% effective,” says Italian sound designer Rafael Bernabeu García, who took on the mixing and sound design for the restoration. In his work, García tried to be as respectful toward the original sound as possible, working with ideas from both Aslani and his daughter to merge the sounds from two films: Chess of The Wind and Aslani’s 1974 film, Therefore Hangs a Tale. “For the most of it, I [simply] brought out the things that sound musical, added an inner rhythm which isn’t metric yet is present in the sound,” says Rafael.
Therefore Hangs a Tale was restored by Eport Studio in collaboration with both Mohammed Reza and Shahrestani. Set at a school, the film is Aslani’s only comedy, and it critiques the mess and chaos within political and governmental regimes—who, in the film, are personified in the authoritarian characters of the school principal and his deputy. (Deemed as anti-royalist, the film was banned in Iran in the 1970s.)
The two re-worked and re-imagined soundtracks were repurposed for reissue by Mississippi Records, run by Iranian-American filmmaker and music archivist Cyrus Moussavi. “We have taken the raw materials and given them a new lease of life,” Moussavi says. “We were receiving the deliverables and following the lead with the whole team working on this album, and it is great to see that, 50 years after the release of the films, we have made the soundtrack available.”
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Chess of the Wind Mississippi Records
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Vinyl LP
Moussavi first saw Chess of the Wind at New York’s Film Forum in 2020, and the music struck him as challenging and strange. Talking about the film with a friend a year or so later, he slowly started thinking that something needed to be done to bring the score back into circulation. “Then little lights aligned,” Moussavi says. “I had some contacts at Criterion, who helped release the film, so I reached out and they put me in touch with the Martin Scorcese Film Foundation, who restored the film. Then we reached out to Gita, who was also very enthusiastic about the project, and she checked with her father as well as Sheida [to get permission].”
The reissue was not without its challenges—the only copy of the soundtrack is the one that appears in the film itself; Gharachedghi lost all of her scores when she left Iran. “I reached out to her and asked her about the music, and she was very happy to collaborate with us.” says Shahrestani. “I told her the story and the idea, and I asked her if she wanted to write the compositions again, but she said no.” Instead, Aslani and Shahrestani extracted the music from the film itself, working around the diagetic sounds to create a kind of “restored” version of the score.
Now, the story of Chess of the Wind is also the story of three generations of Iranians working together to create a beautiful album. While García was based in Spain, Shahrestani was in France, Aslani in Iran, Sheida in Canada, and Moussavi in the States, their continuous conversations and commitment to preserving the overlooked work of Iranian filmmakers and musicians means that a new generation can now discover its wonder.
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