Born in 1922 the son of a diplomat, Farokh Ghafari moved to Paris in the 1940s. Internationally renowned film preservationist Henri Langlois hired him as his assistant at the Cinémathèque Française, the world’s first dedicated motion picture museum and greatest repertory house. Ghafari served for five years as executive secretary of the International Federation of Film Archives and wrote about Iranian cinema history for the influential monthly film journal Positif. Back home, drawing on the deep well of film knowledge he had acquired in Paris, he directed one of the seminal works of Iranian art cinema, Night of the Hunchback (Shab-e Ghouzi, 1964). This dark farce was the first Iranian motion picture to screen at Cannes and other international festivals. After the Revolution, Ghafari returned to Paris and lived there until his death in 2006.
