The Pahlavi-era variety show host had fled after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, going on to become one of its fiercest public detractors on the global stage. Cleaving to long-established rumors about Farrokhzad’s sexuality, the regime tried to portray his murder as either “sex-related” or the work of a rival opposition faction. “It was always a big question among Iranians,” says Shahriar Siami, a Prague-based documentary filmmaker, whose previous work has examined the Persian maestro Mohammad Reza Shajarian and the Islamic Revolution. “There was a lot of gossip; people said he was a homosexual and some even supported what the [Iranian] government said. Some older people of his generation still talk about this case as a kind of taboo, as a ‘problem’. Most people know the government killed him but don’t want to believe it. “We wanted to resolve this question, and also others. If the government killed him, why him?”
