When Mansooreh Saboori was 19, her father, a popular Tehran physician, was imprisoned for speaking against the shah of Iran. “One of the accusations was that he was a communist, which was a common accusation at that time,” she says.

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Saboori married and earned a degree in biology at Tehran University before moving to the U.S. in 1972. The Watergate scandal was heating up. “I came from Iran, where you couldn’t even speak against the shah,” she says. “Here I was seeing the president put on trial.” She and her husband eventually landed in Carbondale, where she earned a BA in communications at Southern Illinois University and gave birth to a daughter. In 1979 she earned a master’s in educational TV, divorced, and returned to Tehran with her daughter–just in time to see the shah overthrown. “It was a tremendous, full-blown revolution,” she says. “It was exciting at the same time. But I did not want to raise my child there. Things were changing so fast you could not catch up with it.”

Six years ago the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Saboori a pair of grants to make a documentary about modern Persian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, whose candid poems of the 1950s and ’60s sparked a women’s literary movement in Iran. She did some of the background work for the film–I Shall Salute the Sun–at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where she was given a research membership. She set up a nonprofit company called Irandukht Productions (“dukht” means daughter), which she operates out of her home in Rogers Park. She also completed the video Another Birth, about 23-year-old Iranian poet Maryam Hooleh.

Saboori returned with 45 hours of footage, and after extensive research she completed Children of the Sun, an hour-long documentary that examines the cultural history of Iran by focusing on religious practices that date from as far back as the second millennium BC. “They have a special prayer for the eclipse,” she says. “It’s Islamic, but I’m pretty sure it has roots in the Zoroastrians. I saw people doing it everywhere.”

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.