Persian Cats: The worst crime they ever did was play some rock & roll.
Underground in Iran
In the woeful country of Iran, music, especially Occidental music, has been forbidden for the last 30 years. It might bring some kind of mental or physical release and who wants that? Like the sight of a woman’s hair in Iran, hearing a woman may arouse sinful thoughts about another kind of release and we just cannot have any of that either. (At least Iran has the death penalty which provides another kind of release, albeit negative.)
So in the land of rising youth, youngsters who make or support non-traditional music must go underground to play what is rather harmless pop music by Occidental standards (I can only imagine what would happen if an Iranian rock band covered the Sex Pistols “God Save the Queen” switching the gender and replacing the word “Queen” with “Ayatollah” or Gang of Four’s “To Hell with Poverty” -- death penalty?)
Offering the first depiction, accurate or otherwise, of this loud yet unspoken subversive phenomenon is co-writer/director Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats (Kasi az gorbehaye irani khabar nadareh).
Winner of the Un Certain Regard at Cannes International Film Festival 2009 -- Special Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Miami Film Festival, No One Knows About Persian Cats follows a group of young musicians and their manager (Hamed Behdad) as they try to raise money to practice, perform and get passports that will get them out of the country.
With a strong blend of cinema verite and commercial license, Ghobadi (A Time for Drunken Horses and Turtles Can Fly) and director of photographer Turaj Aslani sweep the frequently out-of-focus camera around the young underground-ers of Tehran, finding a non-superstitious generation dreaming of world where they can be what they want to be without the being hassled by the Farsi fascists. Their music is usually about youthful love and play while rarely critical of Iran, but when it is, it seems right on the mark.
Saturated with pop culture, audiences in the land of American Idol may see No One Knows About Persian Cats as otherworldly, but it is all too real, illustrating yet another unfortunate aspect of Iran’s theocratic tyranny (but I repeat myself).
