Writer-director Marva Nabili made history in 1977 with The Sealed Soil, the first feature film directed by an Iranian woman to be preserved in its entirety to this day. In pre-revolutionary Iran, a young woman refuses to follow the path imposed on her after reaching marriageable age. Meanwhile, we observe the day-to-day life of her family and an entire village forced to move by government order. The young protagonist's persistent need for independence causes her family to question whether this is a case of demonic possession, and they turn to an exorcist to free her from these undue thoughts and desires. The Sealed Soil is a powerful story of female empowerment, proving that revolutions can also be internal and silent. After almost fifty years, the film returns to the big screen thanks to digital restoration work (from the original 16mm negatives) by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
Marva Nabili
She was born in Iran where she studied painting at the University of Decorative Arts in Tehran. She became involved with the production of a film that marked the formation of the ‘New Wave’ in Iranian cinema: she played the lead in Fereydoon Rahnama’s ‘Siavash in Persepolis’ (1967). This experience drew Nabili to London and New York to study filmmaking where she received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in cinema. She wrote and directed a number of films, notably ‘A Trance’, ‘Self-Portrait’ and ‘Nanette in Vermont’. She returned to Iran to write and direct an eight-hour television series based on classic Persian fairy tales. In the same year she wrote and directed her first feature film, ‘The Sealed Soil’ (1977), the story of an eighteen-year-old peasant woman caught in a transitional period between girlhood and womanhood and the struggle between cultural traditions and modernization confronting her village life.
Digitally restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by the Golden Globe Foundation, Century Arts Foundation, Farhang Foundation and Mark Amin.
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