An unconventional, tone-shifting travelogue that stitches together nations of the former Yugoslavia through chance encounters, 1970s rock music, architecture, and inventive editing, Ryan Ferko’s Hrvoji, Look at You From the Tower locates traces of the past in an increasingly fractured present.

Hrvoji, Look at You from the Tower

Lovers’ Wind, takes its starting point from the helicopter crash at Karaj Dam near Tehran that killed French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse in 1970, during the production of Le Vent des Amoureux (Bād-e Sabā, 1978), a state-funded documentary about Iran.

Lovers' Wind

Le vent des amoureux was completed by Lamorisse’s wife and son, and officially released eight years after the filmmaker’s death. Iran’s Ministry of Art and Culture used additional material to create a seven-minute short film intended as a postscript in veneration of both the filmmaker and the Pahlavi regime’s vision of progress. It was a last gasp, released at the dawn of the Iranian Revolution which would see the ultimate downfall of the Pahlavi regime. A decelerated rendition of this short film accompanies an audio interview with an archivist entrusted with preserving the original reels.