Screening of CHESS OF THE WIND presented by MISSISSIPPI RECORDS with record release of newly recorded soundtrack! Followed by a DJ set by Lil DJ Kebab!
This summer, Mississippi Records will release CHESS OF THE WIND, the soundtrack to Mohammad Reza Aslani’s 1976 film of the same time. A masterpiece of world cinema, Aslani’s CHESS OF THE WIND was banned in Iran and thought lost until a complete print of the film re-emerged in 2014. Restored by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation and released to rapturous reviews in 2020, CHESS OF THE WIND is a genre-breaking queer-class-horror in miniature, and one of the most visionary and daring films of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema.
The film’s soundtrack, by one of Iran’s most revered avant-garde composers, Sheida Gharachedaghi, blends Persian classical instrumentation and atonal dissonance drawn from the composer’s Western-conservatory background. For the new Mississippi Records album, both Aslani and Gharachedaghi worked with film scholar Gita Aslani Shahrestani to revisit their score from fifty years ago and recombine its recorded elements into a new sonic work. The result is a cohesive sound collage tracing the history of the Women’s Rights Movement in Iran from 1905 to the present – a wholly new work that Aslani long dreamt of creating.
CHESS OF THE WIND
Screened publicly just once before it was banned and then lost for decades, this rediscovered jewel of Iranian cinema reemerges to take its place as one of the most singular and astonishing works of the country’s pre-revolution New Wave. A hypnotically stylized murder mystery awash in shivery period atmosphere, Chess of the Wind unfolds in an ornate, candlelit mansion where a web of greed, violence, and betrayal ensnares the heirs to a family fortune as they vie for control of their recently-deceased matriarch’s estate. Melding the influences of European modernism, gothic horror, and classical Persian art, director Mohammad Reza Aslani crafts an exquisitely controlled mood piece that erupts in a stunningly subversive final act in which class conventions, gender roles, and even time itself are upended with shocking ferocity.