Bahman Ghobadi: No One Knows About Persian Cats

I read this dispatch from SXSW with great interest: a review of the new film No One Knows About Persian Cats, and cannot wait to see it. The film premiered at Cannes, winning a Special Jury Prize, and tells the story of two indie rock musicians in Tehran, searching for a way to make their art, without, you know, imprisonment.

Negar and Askan’s search for underground musicians through windy roads, basements, secret practice spaces is fascinating. At each stop, these real-life musicians play their music as the pair listen in, studying to see what and who will work with their band. These scenes often incorporate montages of Tehran street life. One of the most interesting segments concerns a rap group meeting on a floor of an unfinished building, and overlooking the city the group raps about class struggle in Tehran.

Awesome. Ghobadi is a definitely someone to watch. I adored his film Half Moon (my review here. Also, if you are interested, I mentioned in one of my posts about Jafar Panahi that you cannot get to my site in Iran, I imagine due to the amount of time I have devoted to Iranian cinema, and the powers-that-be have figured out a way to block certain sites from public viewing. If you look at that post for Half Moon, check out the comment from Hossein, who hacked through the firewall. I get emails quite often from inventive Iranian computer-geeks, who are able to see my site at an Internet cafe, or their computer lab – anyway, it’s very moving, in an awful way. Really makes you see the importance of art there, and what it represents.) It seems with this latest Ghobadi is continuing on his exploration of the role of music in Iranian life (Ghobadi is Kurdish, born and raised in Iran, and so his Kurdish identity is even more of a potent issue – since the persecution of the Kurds has been so extreme – the real subject of Half Moon – a must-see).

One of the good things about living where I do is that if a film gets distribution of any kind, I am almost guaranteed that it will be playing in my vicinity. I am REALLY looking forward to this one.