Chooka

This cryptic work is less a documentary than a poetic evocation of mysterious, overlapping traces of the past. It begins from archival footage of Canadian workers establishing a paper factory in pre-revolutionary 1970s Iran; they fled in ’79. In a nearby home, during the factory’s construction, a family hosted the filmmaker Bahram Beyzai as he made The Stranger and The Fog (1974); post-revolution, he shot Bashu, the Little Stranger (1986) there. So many memories and ghosts cross paths between these sites today; the village’s inhabitants peer at photographs and tell their tales, while images from Beyzai’s fictions evoke loss of identity. (Viennale)