These two Iranian adventurers undertook an improbable world tour in the 1950s and 1960s, first on a motorbike through Asia, Oceania or America, then in a 2 CV on the African continent. The story of their ten years of travel, still largely unknown in the French-speaking world, is finally adapted and translated into French.
Tehran, summer 1954
Issa and Abdullah Omidvar get on their Matchless motorbike and trace a path of freedom and brotherhood like no other, which will take them on the tracks of Africa, the sandy roads of Australia or the winding roads of Tibet. For three years, the two brothers have been preparing for this great trip, with the idea of meeting, filming and “studying” the most isolated peoples of the planet in mind. Ten years later, they will have crossed nearly 100 countries, lived for months with the Aborigines, the Inuits of the Far North, the Pygmies or remote ethnic groups of Amazonia, collecting valuable testimonies along the way (writings, objects, photos and films) of a particularly rich world, sometimes without borders, but already shaken by a globalized order which has the firm intention of imposing itself everywhere. When they return to Iran, they will be welcomed as heroes. Their unprecedented trip is a feat.
Tehran, 2000s
Jean-Louis Ozsvath, a Frenchman with a passion for travel, discovered, like many, the existence of these two Iranian pioneers of exploration, through the museum dedicated to them in Tehran, in the palace of Saadabad, presented as the “first Iranian Museum of Ethnology”. He also discovers the account published in English of this world tour, written by Abdullah and Issa. Better still, Jean-Louis Ozsvath learns that the two brothers are still alive and continue to share their memories from Iran, where Issa lives, and Chile, where Abdullah has settled (until his recent death in the summer 2022). He then undertook to meet them from Santiago to Tehran, and to adapt their travelogue into French, still totally unknown in the French-speaking world.
During their ten years on the road, the Omidvar brothers did more than share the daily life of the peoples they met. They filmed them, followed them for a long time, trying to understand them, get to know them without the colonial prejudices that still guided many Europeans then. They were Iranians, their relationship was different, often with fresh eyes, sometimes naive. But what is striking when reading their story, published by Névicata/Elytis, is the extent to which the two Iranian ethnographers and documentary filmmakers alert us, in their own way, to the direction that the course of history and the world is taking, denouncing overpopulation, overexploitation of natural resources and the ongoing disappearance of the wealth and cultural diversity embodied by the first peoples. Two not ordinary adventurers who must therefore be followed and to whom we must also, finally, pay homage.
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