Documenting the legacy of Iranian pop icon Googoosh through the eyes of film director Niloufar Taghizadeh

“I felt like I was 14 again. I was no longer a film director — just a girl who was a fan,” begins filmmaker Niloufar Taghizadeh about meeting the subject of her documentary Googoosh: Made of Fire.

Niloufar’s latest cinematic offering is part fan film part socio-political history of the last half-century in Iran. The film about the quintessential Iranian pop star, Googoosh, juxtaposes images of mid-century Tehran with her exile in the West, concert footage and images of revolution and protest from 1978 until the more recent Women, Life, Freedom movement.

Like her troubled nation, Googoosh is a survivor. Her story is the story of Iran, and 46-year-old Niloufar Taghizadeh is well-placed to tell it.

Born the year the Revolution began, she is also one of the lost generation of Iranians who came of age knowing only war and oppression.

“I think my film speaks to my generation,” Niloufar tells The New Arab. "You know, 46 years — the best years of their lives — were cut out. Nobody is talking about it. Where have these years gone?”

When asked if she feels she is the voice for the Gen X of Iran, she replies, “I am too small to be a voice. We need hundreds of them.”

Niloufar is part of a generation now rediscovering the pop icon who was a star before they were born. She grew up in Mashad in the 80s and 90s watching Googoosh's films and listening to her cassettes from her parents’ vast archive of content.

“My friends and I adored Googoosh and would dress up like her. We would film ourselves singing and dancing to her songs. But I was always confused by how someone who everyone loved had virtually disappeared from public life,” Niloufar says. 

Buying any pop music at that time, she says, was akin to buying drugs. It was a clandestine act.

“I remember there was a toy store for kids in the mall near my school. There were code phrases like, ‘My cousin told me that you have a toy for me,’ and some guy would come out with something wrapped in paper,” Niloufar explains. 

Carrying a love for Googoosh from Iran to Germany

Like many in the diaspora, Niloufar has carried her love of Googoosh with her to her new home in Germany where she moved in 1996, (and went on to study film,) and even when she returned to Iran in 2009 to shoot the Green Movement protests with a cameraman from ZDF.

A few years ago, she managed to contact Googoosh through an introduction to her art director and gradually forged a friendship that led to the making of the film and access to the star's private archive.

The film includes rare footage of her singing as a young child and visits to the Shah’s palace where she played with Queen Soraya’s dress.

Googoosh shares a story about being forced to have her lyricist rewrite lyrics deemed too political for the palace in pre-Revolutionary Iran. As if inside the mind of Googoosh — or any exiled artist — the film fuses the past and present to leave the audience contemplating the future of both the singer and her homeland.

A celebration of the human spirit in the midst of oppression, the film opens with Googoosh saying, “Humans carry a power within them. A source of strength. We all have it even if we don’t know it.”

As she recounts the perils of the 1979 revolution that led to her 20 years of house arrest, accompanied by excellent archival footage of students smashing images of the Shah and women holding Kalashnikovs, she notes “We Iranians wake up in the morning surrounded by politics.”

Journey through exile and resistance

On the day of our interview, Iran and Israel are locked in an ongoing war of attrition and Niloufar is about to fly to Hamburg, where her film will open the festival on the same day as the Berlin Wall came down.

“I want to be happy about my upcoming film premiere, but the news this morning gave me the chills,” she tells The New Arab. “It’s hard to know what to do. Should I go to Australia and try to forget about Iran for my mental health? When will I be able to make a film about Iran that isn’t about politics?”

While she doesn’t see herself as an activist per se, she sees filmmaking as her mission. “This is something I have to do,” she says.

And so, just like her childhood heroine Googoosh, Niloufar uses culture as a device to tell the story of Iran.

The film recounts how Googoosh decided to dedicate her recent “farewell tour” to the late Mahsa Amini, killed by religious police for not wearing her hijab correctly.

As the opening vamp from Jesus Christ Superstar ushers her onstage to a crowd of diaspora fans in Germany, in an orientalised Lloyd Webber moment, she tells them: “Since more than 40 years these beasts have been killing Mahsa's to cause sorrow and suffering,” and “from now on we must stand behind all Mahsa's and all women of our country.”

In a telling moment, she reveals that towards the end of her two-decade post-revolutionary virtual house arrest when she was banned from performing, she tried to catch a ride with a group of young people driving by and blasting her old songs from their stereo. They drove on oblivious, not recognising their country’s biggest star.

Eventually, she was allowed to leave on an international tour in 2000 with a group of unscrupulous promoters who took all the proceeds and left her stranded and alone in Canada.

Now, based in LA and having re-established her bona fides with a whole new generation, she’s singing songs written by young composers with lines like: “My Iran – a torture chamber for the innocent, country of 80 million hostages.”

But Niloufar’s goal as a filmmaker she says, was to understand the “woman behind the icon” and the film delivers this in spades, revealing Googoosh’s private hopes, fears and scars. As she offers up candid interviews about her life as an exile, a single parent and an artist, her integrity, grit and creativity shine through the screen.

Fusing romantic love with love for a lost homeland

Like her last film about the children of temporary marriages in Iran who live in a legal netherworld where they remain unrecognised, Niloufar’s focus is on humanity beneath the political reality.

Still, she salutes the many women artists and filmmakers in Iran today who risk their lives for their work.

“Women in Iran are making undercover films now without the hijab and there are still many singers that are in the same situation that Googoosh was in two decades ago," she says.

"Musical instruments are forbidden on public television, and while there are many private parties, women can only sing in public as part of a choral ensemble.”

Niloufar recounts how recently a woman was jailed for singing Amy Winehouse songs on YouTube. And yet, in her hometown of Mashad, the holy city where music has been banned for 46 years, there are dozens of heavy metal bands, she says, including girl groups.

While she can’t reveal too much about her next project, Niloufar says it will be a feature film with Iranian and German stars. And with that, she’s off to Hamburg for her German premiere, on the day commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“It makes me think of that famous Googoosh song, Dou Panjareh. Like a long and proud tradition of Persian poetry, the lyrics have a double meaning, fusing romantic love with love for a lost homeland," Niloufar says. 

'We cannot stir

under the burden of the wall

all the love between you and me

has become a tale of a wall made of stone'

Just like the singer and her songs, Niloufar’s love for her homeland pierces the walls she faces and imbues Googoosh: Made of Fire with both nostalgia and hope.

Hadani Ditmars is the author of Dancing in the No Fly Zone and has been writing from and about the MENA since 1992. Her next book, Between Two Rivers, is a travelogue of ancient sites and modern culture in Iraq. www.hadaniditmars.com

Follow her on X: @HadaniDitmars