Moderating the Q/A for Sreemoyee Singh’s debut feature Be Kucheye Khoshbakht, And Towards Happy Alleys,  that was selected in the Berlin International Film Festival’s Panorama section, was the most beautiful gift to celebrate my #25YearsWithBerlinale. Shot in Iran and made in Farsi, the film earned a five-minute-long standing ovation; many were in tears in the audience, and when Sreemoyee Singh sang a beautiful Farsi song, Soltane Ghalbha (The King of Hearts) at the end, many Iranians in the audience sang it with her, moist-eyed. A PhD from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Singh has made a personal documentary over six years in the pursuit of learning the Farsi language, Iranian cinema and poetry, and the film soon moves seamlessly to the heart of the Iranian revolution. 

At the Film Studies Dept at Jadavpur University, Singh was exposed to Iranian cinema, and Iranian poetry, including that of Forough Farrokhzad. Dissatisfied with the English translation, she decided to learn Farsi at Tehran University, so she could better appreciate Farrokhzad’s poetry in the original. Her PhD is on The Exiled Filmmaker in Post-Revolution Iran. She interviewed a number of Iranians, including filmmakers in exile such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Bahman Ghobadi, and others including Jafar Panahi (who is in the film) and Mohammad Rasoulof, who are in internal exile. Panahi drives Singh around in his car, as she films him (shades of Panahi’s Taxi), and they pass the Evin prison from where Panahi was recently released, along with Rasoulof, while hundreds others languish in jail on flimsy charges. 
There’s a deeply moving moment when Panahi talks of how oppressive it is that the regime has banned him from making films (although he has miraculously continued to make them), and confides to Singh about the time he considered suicide, and walked deep into the sea, “but the waves kept rebuffing me,” he says. “I survived, and it made me even more determined to keep making films.”