NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT PERSIAN CATS
Produced & Directed by Bahman Ghobadi
Written by Ghobadi & Roxana Saberi
Released by IFC Films
Farsi with English subtitles
Iran. 101 mins. Not Rated
With Negar Shaghaghi, Ashkan Koshanejad & Hamed Behdad 
 

Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s fiction features have hauntingly portrayed the plight of traditional musicians at the war-torn borders of rural Kurdistan—an itinerant wedding band in Marooned in Iraq and suppressed women singers in Half Moon. In No One Knows About Persian Cats, he weaves a fictional story around tracking down the real hipsters struggling to play music today in the heart of Tehran.

Indie rockers Negar (Negar Shaghaghi) and Ashkan (Ashkan Koshanejad) dream of playing a gig overseas, let alone performing where their family and friends could see them. Just out of prison, they have to carefully navigate Iran’s thicket of rules against secular music and international travel. (No wonder her lyrics are so depressing.) They convince the motor-mouth fixer Nader (the endlessly entertaining Hamed Behdad) to be their manager, and he leads them on an odyssey through the underground music scene—from blues to hip hop to crooners to rock—to try to get what they need, from visas to additional band mates and back-up singers.

Here the underground is literal. To hide from tattling neighbors, worried parents, let alone the authorities, many of the real bands they visit practice in sub-basements. Others scavenge building materials from the street to soundproof rooftop hideaways. A heavy metal band disturbs the cows by playing out in a barn, where the manure really gets to them. A handsome troubadour leads Afghan and Iraqi refugee children in quiet songs of protest, and two sisters try to circumvent rules against women’s public performance by inviting guests to listen to their traditional duets in their home. (Not all the performers can be as easily identified when they are heard or seen until the final credits.)

With posters on their walls of the Beatles, Joy Division and Arctic Monkeys, most of the shaggy-haired young musicians just want to make music, even if they have to soften their lyrics to get an elusive performance permit with the ever-changing Catch-22-like requirements. Some sing in English to connect to the global music scene, with band names Yellow Dogs and Free Keys, while others want to make their more populist points in Farsi (which is always called Persian in the subtitles.) While each band plays on the soundtrack, the camera twirls around the extremes of Tehran street life.

The fraught experiences here contrast sadly with the Islamic musicians in other countries seen in recent documentaries. Fatih Akin’s Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul celebrated the cross-cultural pollination possible in Turkey, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love emphasized his inspiration in the Sufism of Senegal.

Tehran’s underground arts community of frustrated young people is shown without Ghobadi’s humorous irony in Granaz Moussavi’s even more tense debut feature, My Tehran for Sale, which is screening around the U.S. and Canada in the Global Lens film series. Also filmed surreptitiously around the city, its fictional overlay has actress/dancer Marzieh (very poignantly played by Marzieh Vafamehr) stressed by the country’s stultifying atmosphere where rehearsals have to be hidden. After her theater troupe gives up and she witnesses the brutal repression by the religious police against her friends, she tries the asylum route, only to find the West does not recognize the restrictions on her art as persecution. With both of these films, the rest of the world will know more about Persian artists. Nora Lee Mandel
April 16, 2010