Maxime Feri Farzaneh (1929-2022) *93

was a French-Iranian writer and filmmaker. He signed his books "M.F. Farzaneh" and his films "Feri Farzaneh". Farzaneh was born in Tehran, Iran on 2 July 1929. He started to study at the age of 6 in the only boy-and-girl school in Tehran. He went to Tamaddon High School. This particularly cosmopolitan school, nested in the Embassies' District of Tehran, would lead him to befriend numerous Russian, Polish, Czech, and Romanian refugees as well as all kinds of Iranians – be it Shiites, Assyrians, Jews and Armenians.

The Dean, Mr. Salek, had chosen his Faculty outside the recommendations of the Ministry of Education. For instance, the French teacher had come from France, through Algeria to Tehran amidst WWII. Always looking sharp, that gentleman would only speak French. So much so that for the most part, his students did not know he was actually Iranian! The maths teacher was a chemical engineer and the literature teacher, Javad Fazel, was a renowned serial novelist. He was actually the first one to encourage Farzaneh to start writing, publishing one of his poems in a weekly magazine.

While about to graduate from Alborz high school, Philosophy professor S. Goharine, a renowned specialist of Mowlavi, introduced Farzaneh to Sadegh Hedayat. Hedayat encouraged him to read Kafka and Sartre – from which he had personally translated a few books – as well as Joyse, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, John Dos Passos.

At the age of twenty, Farzaneh decided to write his first novel: Four Aches. In this book, he used the inner monologue in Persian literature.