The Best Things Richard Brody Saw During Week One of the New York Film Festival

Bakhshi and Najdi’s collecting is inextricably bound up with their art. Both are painters. Although they paint separately, in different styles and ways—Haghighi delights in comparing their methods—they both create large, realistic yet phantasmagorical paintings using images gleaned from scrounged-up photo albums, and they both scavenge small-scale items for use in collages. Yet it is not just their use of found objects that is artistic but the very way that they contemplate these pieces and explore the histories they contain. The film, while centering Iran’s current political and social crises, also brings to light obscure aspects, moments, and corners of Iranian history, public and private, which Bakhshi and Najdi discuss in great detail. One of the albums in the pair’s collection is filled with photographs (of extraordinary, poignant provenance) from the nineteen-forties and fifties of women who, as children, had been abducted and forced into prostitution. Another includes photos (seemingly from the sixties or early seventies) of men in bathing suits at a swimming spot that appears to be a meeting place for gay men. A large collection of notebooks by an unknown man turns out to be a trove of outsider art—a copious, fanatically pursued life’s project, consisting of drawings and speculative writings on a wide range of scientific and spiritual subjects.

Haghighi’s filming of the couple, their work, and their world is artistic in itself; he brings their ideas and observations to the screen by responding to them with images and cinematic practices that offer the visual variety and energetic invention of his dramatic features. In response to a conversation in which the couple decry the prevalence of tattoos, Haghighi shows startlingly intimate closeups of the tattoos on the skin of their assistants (as well as one that Bakhshi himself got in his youth). The director follows the couple in their rounds of collecting, interviewing the merchants at an antique shop and a rug shop about this distinctive pair of customers. He also interviews a psychologist about hoarding, from a medical and emotional perspective—but he does so ironically, in contrast to the earnest, intense, and highly principled practicality of the couple’s archival fervor.

Though large-scale politics filter into their work, Bakhshi and Najdi place more stress on the fact that their very practice of collecting and archiving—their gathering and preservation of overlooked, discarded, and seemingly banal materials—exemplifies a crucially political ideal. Their collection isn’t merely a trove of aesthetic wonders in the raw but also an act of “rebellion,” a way of “resisting” official histories that privilege the stories and artifacts of the rich and powerful. The couple’s collection exalts experiences and creations of ordinary people who otherwise would be lost to history along with their disdained treasures.

The inspiration that Haghighi draws, above all, from the couple’s work is on bold display in his original approach to archival images—which is also a living lesson to the world’s filmmakers. He cites and shows the item in the collection that sparked his desire to make the movie, an album of slides depicting an academic botanist’s family life and scientific work. The portraits in the album—family outings in the countryside, a wedding party, domestic gatherings—are, at first glance, unexceptional, even banal. But, having offered these initial glimpses, Haghighi’s camera gets to work, macrophotographically zeroing in on small groups and on individual faces and gestures. His reframings reveal that those casual images contain latent portraiture with the grandeur and the power of classical paintings. At times, the ultra-closeups move in even further to spotlight vague forms of shadow and light, color and shape, along with the intensified grain of the photographic image itself, giving rise to a haunting series of avant-garde abstractions. Haghighi’s highly technical quest for hidden demotic beauty parallels the couple’s own passion while also offering a sharp practical and artistic lesson for all filmmakers: not to use archival images as history by the yard but as subjects in themselves, ones as much in need of uninhibited directorial intervention as any fictional subject. “I Deserve a Lover . . .” is a thrilling display of humanistic enthusiasm, aesthetic inspiration, and creative freedom on both sides of the camera.

This first week the N.Y.F.F. offers two more extraordinary documentaries: William and David Greaves’s “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” (the recent completion of William Greaves’s 1972 gathering, in Duke Ellington’s apartment, of Harlem Renaissance luminaries who recall the movement and spotlight its enduring influence); and Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s “NAZA” (detailing, by way of interviews with Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, how A.I.-assisted systems have led to a high death toll of civilians in Gaza). There may well be others that I haven’t yet seen. But the schedule doesn’t stint on fiction, which shows up in boldly expectation-defying forms. One of the most notable is the French director Arthur Harari’s “The Unknown,” a surprisingly realistic treatment of fantasy. His previous film “Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle” (released in the U.S. in 2022) was painfully literal and script-bound, but “The Unknown” starts at a high level of artifice that gains great dramatic intensity from the filmmaker’s sincere and ardent curiosity. Harari’s realism isn’t an imposed form but an outcome of fiercely focussed attention.