We are very pleased to be opening the new film FIFI HOWLS FROM HAPPINESS at our Royal and Town Center theaters on Friday, August 15. The lyrical documentary explores the enigma of provocative artist Bahman Mohassess, the so-called “Persian Picasso,” whose acclaimed paintings and sculptures dominated pre-revolutionary Iran. In the Village Voice Michael Atkinson called the film “never less than addictively fascinating – Mohassess’s story is a heroic torch of individualism battling mad-state ideology, from the Shah to the mullahs, and his autumnal stance toward all things non-Mohassess is hilariously derisive.” Recently Hollywood Soapbox interviewed director Mitra Farahani about her film. Mohassess, she says, “used to ask: “what could be the meaning of painting anymore, in a world with a sky devoid of birds, a sea devoid of fishes and a wood devoid of beasts?’ In front of all that violence Mohassess’ answer of course was not self-destruction, for the course of his life showed him harshly struggling with those issues, in a positive attitude. But certainly the end of his life, the choice of self-exile and symbolic retirement, all the violence in the world that profoundly disgusted him, all contributed to a more violent answer to violence. Destruction progressively becoming a part of it.”
