The first and only film directed by Forugh Farrokhzad, one of the most influential (and controversial) Iranian poets and feminists, The House is Black depicts a series of events in the life of an isolated community of lepers in the north of Iran. Combining documentary images and narrated excerpts from the Old Testament, the Quran and her own poems, the director delicately films the various stages of the disease — casting her gaze on the fragility of the human condition, but also on the beauty and hope that can coexist with suffering.