Coming to RMIT’s The Capitol, Melbourne on 1 May – ZÖJ (Gelareh Pour and Brian O’Dwyer) brings new life to a landmark silent film, crafting a live score that fuses past and present in a journey across sound and image. This performance is not mere accompaniment; it is an act of translation, of reawakening. Every note, every pause, folds you into the landscape, asking you to see, hear, and feel differently. This is cinema made live.
Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925) is a pioneering ethnographic film by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (creators of King Kong) and Marguerite Harrison. It chronicles the epic migration of the Bakhtiari people of Iran; families crossing snowbound mountains and wild rivers with tens of thousands of animals. Nearly a century later, the images remain astonishing: human endurance rendered in stark black and white.
Witness Grass become an alive artifact of history; an urgent, breathing encounter where cinema and sound converge. Gelareh’s haunting kamancheh and voice summon the landscapes of Iran, threading heritage into the film’s heart, while Brian’s elemental rhythms carve tension and search for release. The result transcends nostalgia, it is a transformation: Grass reborn as a living conversation between past and present – a reflection on movement, displacement and the fragile relationship between people and land.
Presented by Castlemaine Documentary Festival (CDoc) after a sell out show for the Castlemaine State Festival, this event reflects the festival’s long-standing commitment to documentary cinema as a collective, cultural experience where film, sound and audience come together in the same room.
