Lor Girl ( Dokhtar-e Lor ) was the first sound film ever to be produced in the Persian language. In 1932, it was produced by Ardeshir Irani and Abdolhossein Sepanta under the Imperial Film Company in Bombay.
The movie starred Sepanta himself along with Ruhangiz Sami-Nezhad, Hadi Shirazi and Sohrab Puri. The filming took only seven months to complete, and the movies arrived in Iran in October 1933. They were released at only two major theatres, Mayak and Sepah.
The Lor Girl as the first Iranian film with sound was an instantaneous success and shows were ultimately sold out.
Plot:
The movie is about a young teahouse girl from the Lor people that is kidnapped and taken by a band of thieves when she was little. The leader of the thieves, Gholi Khan, is beginning to look at her with interest with her coming of age. At the teahouse, she meets a young man called Jafar. They fall in love, and plan to escape together. Gholi Khan catches on to their plans and beats up Jafar. Jafar and Golnar, the Lor girl, escape to Bombay to find security from the lawlessness of Iran. They later return in the movie to find a different kind of lawlessness than before.
This movie is said to have a political undertone in the plot that suggests the differences under the Qajar dynasty’s rule, and later Reza Shah’s.
Fist Woman Star:
The Lor Girl is the first feature film to use a female performer as a star. It was still a taboo at the time to broadcast women in film and even radio at the time. Roohangiz Saminejad was a volunteer and a wife of a studio employee at the time. This role made her an automatic star whose fame unfortunately lasted for a short period. In her later years, she moved to Tehran under a different name and died in old age in anonymity.
Trivia:
The people that Sepanta found in the Iranian diaspora community in India were mainly from the Kerman province and had thick Kermani accents. To accommodate for this difference, the storyline actually plays out in rural Kerman.
The movie was remade in the 1970s and titled Jafar-o-Golnar.
Author’s Notes:
Sound was first introduced on Film with the Jazz Singer (1926/1927) with Al Johnson in the Title Role:
