Tickets are still available for CHESS OF THE WIND at Genesis Cinema on 23rd April. Read below for:

• Why the 1976 gothic thriller was only shown twice until 2020;

• Why I’m obsessed with Aki Karuismaki these days;

• But first, I’ve been listening to loads of film music recently so here’s a playlist of soundtracks from 20th century non-English films…

Unsorted music I like from non-English films I like

A slapdash mix of music used in films I like - ranging from lush instrumentals by Shigeru Umebayashi (‘In the Mood for Love’l) and Philip Glass (‘Mishima’) to Egyptian musical songs (Abdel Halim Hafez) as well as plenty English language choons from Janis Joplin, Marlene Dietriech, and Elvis Presley, and more (used in the films of the German R.W. Fassbinder and the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki - more on the latter below). It’s a real mix and I’ve paid next to no attention to the order so I recommend playing on shuffle and saving for future reference.

I wish Sheida Gharachedaghi’s soundtrack to Chess of the Wind was on Spotify. You can hear her entrancing drums in this Instagram reel.

Drifting Clouds (1996, Finland)

Aki Kaurismaki is an auteur with a style so distinctive that his second name could be short hand. The Kaurismaki-esque is an absurdist mix of comedy and drama that combines social issues with the artifice of cinema - like a Ken Loach film you’d actually enjoy watching. Watch ‘Drifting Clouds’ (trailer) to enter ‘Kaurismaki-land’ and you won’t be disappointed.

Married couple Ilona and Lauri, both lose their low-paying jobs and go through absurd financial and legal calamities but keep on preserving to a heart-warming ending. Every single thing inside every frame in a Kaurismaki film is considered and goes towards his idiosyncratic style. Take, for example, how he doesn’t show the physical fight between the chef and the waiter at the restaurant where Ilona first works but instead focuses on reactions and how the characters enter and exit the frame - leading to something visually funnier. Or these lines from when poker-faced Ilona is applying for a new job:

You can watch ‘Drifting Clouds’ on Mubi. Where you can also watch Kaurismaki’s latest film, ‘Fallen Leaves’ (2023).

Chess of the Wind was thought lost for four decades - then the director’s son found it in a junk shop

Some films have backstories as riveting as their narratives. Released in 1976, Chess of the Wind was shown twice before disappearing. The first screening was reportedly plagued by a faulty projector and an agitated audience. The second was to an empty cinema. It was simply too different, too transgressive in style and story, for a pre-revolutionary Iran. The film’s strong women who fight men as equals, its lesbian love dynamic, and its idiosyncratic composition - it was all too much for criticss who were more comfortable with social realist dramas. The bad reception meant there was no domestic release. The chaos of the 1979 Islamic Revolution meant the film’s international release was a dud too. The clerics decreed that no woman should have her hair uncovered on screen and that meant ‘Chess of the Wind’ was banned. For four decades, it was never publicly screened again.

Writer-director Mohammad Reza Aslani didn’t have his own copy of the film and it was thought lost. His daughter Gita, and his son Amin, trawled archives all over the world. In the mid 2010s, Amin spotted a pile of film cans in an antique shop in Tehran. The shop keeper said they were being sold as decoration. Incredibly, Amin opened them to find a high quality copy of his father’s film. The family smuggled it out of Iran and got it to Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation (it’s thanks to them that we’re screening this!) who painstakingly restored it to perfection.

The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project is doing amazing work restoring gems from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. I’m working through their collection and hope to bring more from their catalogue to London screens.

In the mean time, come to Chess of the Wind if you can.