Along with the Wind in the Solitude of the Desert 1999

"The desert", says the Austrian geographer Alfons Gabriel, "will never let go of the one whom he has taken in his charm". Sixty years after Gabriel's travels to the deserts of Iran, the Iranian director Manouchehr Tayab began his attempts to find the rest of the unknown routes crossing the Iranian vast deserts. It took eight to nine years for him to complete this project, and the result was more than a thousand photographs and slides, along with tons of notes which he used to write a book on this subject. Later on, he made use of this collection to make the documentary "Hamrah-e Bad". Tayab recounts the story of the making of this movie in a book by the same name: he had with him a group of not only professional but eager people; people who were travelers, and not only normal travelers, but travelers of desest: where the heat sometimes goes up to 50°C and the dry weather is killing; where one would be doomed if gets lost; where no one would be safe from the attack of snakes and other creatures; where at 23:00 the heat reaches 40°C; where the camera becomes so hot that your flesh sticks to it. It is a place where, if it rains, the earth becomes like a paste in just half an hour, and it becomes impossible to move forward; where the sandstorms and winds are sometimes so strong that take the camera, tripod and the men behind them off the ground. This group however, endured everything and succeeded in making this important movie. "All that said", writes Tayab in the last entry of his notebook, "from the trip whose memories will last like a dream in the memories of all those involved, there remains 12 rolls of 10-min 35mm color films to be recorded in the history of the Iranian Cinema".