By Derk Richardson  July 17th, 2009 5:06 pm  |  Comments (0)

In 1971, French film director Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman, And Now My Love) presented Empress Farah, the wife of Iran’s Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, with an extraordinary gift—an 18-minute homage to the history, geography, and culture of Iran.

Reportedly funded by a multinational petroleum-pipeline construction firm, the beautifully edited film is as masterfully complex as it is blatantly romantic. Scenes from everyday life in then-modernizing Iran are interspersed with footage of glorious landscapes, architecture, and antiquities, accompanied by Francis Lai’s psychedelic-tinged French pop score, a period piece itself.

Given the changes wrought in the region over the past 38 years, this long-obscure documentary is probably a far more fascinating and provocative travelogue now than it was then. The film is one of the gems in the Internet collection of the Academic Film Archive of North America.

Watch the full film here: Iran (1971).