Ryan Ferko
Lovers’ Wind
¹ Mercer Union, January 20–March 23, 2024
² Western Front, Sept 14–Nov 23, 2024
³ Cinema Version
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko
37 min | 16mm to HD | Iran/Tunisia/Canada | 2024
In 1970, French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse was killed when the helicopter he was filming from crashed into the newly built Karaj Dam near Tehran. While the film from his camera remained submerged for several weeks, Iran’s Ministry of Art and Culture later retrieved, processed, and eventually released these images as a posthumous addition to Lamorrisse’s ethnographic Le Vent des Amoureux (Bād-e Sabā, 1978). Nearly 40 years later, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko’s Lovers’ Wind returns to the dam, rewinding Lamorrise’s final images to evoke a fractured, disrupted, and dislocated new voice for the fabled easterly breeze. As a filmstrip in decay slowly disentangles the filmmaker from his own aerial images, the resulting film confronts a different reality on the ground, where spatial and temporal borders inform a different kind of movement and memory.
The cinema version of Lovers’ Wind includes a separate single-channel work titled Postscript