Synopsis: This long-form documentary is a look at the life and art of Ms. Iran Darroudi, one of the most important contemporary Iranian painters, who has divided her time between Tehran and Paris for the past fifty years. The film describes the various influences in her life and how she came to cultivate a style that merges the western surrealism with eastern mysticism.

…Flowing from limpid sources, Iran Darroudi’s Surrealistic works bear visual similarities to those of the great masters of this western school of painting. Yet, notwithstanding these visual similarities, deep mental differences separate them from Western Surrealistic paintings, because Iran Darroudi’s paintings are rooted in an Oriental mysticism, the enigmatic silence of which pervades all the constituent elements of her works: a silence that assimilates everything in a poetic crystallization of time and light. Therefore, the similarity of these two different outlooks is only apparent.

…Iran Darroudi’s works are suffused with transcendent thought. Having achieved an extraordinary technique, this artist has succeeded in transferring the most delicate vibrations of her soul to her canvases. In some of her paintings, with only a few bold and hasty brushstrokes, she has created stupendous atmospheres in which all of man’s aspirations and defeats are reflected. Stones and flowers, which constituted the main themes of her past works, reappear in some of her recent paintings, albeit in a more stylized abstract manner that bespeaks her swift evolution within a short period of time. Iran Darroudi is a painter well aware of her historic and social mission as an intellectual artist. Her sensitive soul is the crossroads of all progressive thoughts, manifesting itself in the form of rigid crystallized stones and vivid fresh flowers. For her, stones perhaps symbolize a mental lethargy and social indolence conducive to an intellectual dead end, and flowers may be a sign of hope and brighter tomorrows.

…Without becoming entirely abstract in their weightlessness, her forms stand at the frontier between imagination and reality. The roaring waves of time depicted in coarse milky brushstrokes, set out from infinity to verge on reality with time encompassing everything in its eternity. Through her amazing technique, she depicts the dimensions of time and space in a fantastic manner between reality and imagination. To define her as the thoughtful portraitist of ethereal moments may not be appropriate. Many works in this collection well illustrate the fact that the artist has something profound, painful and occasionally appalling to say and that the manner she adopts to express these nightmarish feelings is best suited to the purpose.

…A symbolic use of stones, flowers and waves appears in many of her paintings, but this in no way affects her atmosphere. Light, vivid colors are always visible alongside dark ones, which express her despair and sorrow, bespeaking the philosophical dichotomy of her psychological and social ego.