6/21/2023 0 Comments Tony mitchell far away from home![]() ![]() He began rapping in English, but soon switched to rapping in Farsi, and has collaborated with UK rapper Reveal. It also features Iran’s first rapper, Hishkas (Nobody), often referred to as ‘the godfather of Iranian rap’, who formed the group 021 (the area code for Tehran) in 2003 and released the first Iranian hip hop album, Jangale Asfalt (The Asphalt Jungle) in 2006. The film culminates in a violent encounter between Negar, Ashkan and their dog and the police. Even émigré Iranian musicians are not safe, it would seem. In November 2013 two members of Yellow Dogs were shot to death by a disgruntled hanger on of the band, who subsequently committed suicide. They subsequently moved to New York and played at the US premiere of the film. Also featured in the film were Yellow Dogs, a Western styled group who sang a song in English, ‘New Century’, and who cited Joy Division and Talking Heads as influences. In the process, they and their sometime manager Nader take us on a tour of Tehran’s musical underground, mostly in living rooms, lounges and tiny clubs, ranging from metalheads on a farm to street rappers to classical Persian songs performed by an all-women group – which is illegal because they are performing in mixed company. Ghobadi appears in the film, making music while waiting for a permit for his next film, and the couple in the film, Negar and Ashkan, dream of escaping to the UK, which they eventually did in real life, and also talk about wanting to go to Iceland to see Sigur Rós play. ![]() His 2006 film Half Moon narrates the story of a group of Iranian Kurdish musicians trying to travel to Iraqi Kurdistan to organize a concert there, and No One Knows about Persian Cats follows on from this in tracing the hardships facing young Iranian indie musicians seeking to evade censorship. Ghobadi’s first feature film was the highly successful A Time for Drunken Horses (2000), the first Kurdish film produced in Iran, which won the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide film festivals held retrospective tributes to Panahi in 2011, and have continued to screen his clandestine films. ![]() Panahi continues to make clandestine films such as This Is Not a Film (2011), which was smuggled to Cannes on a USB stick hidden in a cake, and Taxi (2015), which also did the rounds of film festivals, winning the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlin film festival. Ghobadi hasn’t yet suffered the fate of his compatriot Jafar Panahi, who was banned from making films for 20 years, but he did get into a stoush with his former mentor Abbas Kiarastami, whose assistant director he used to be, who criticised the film for ‘lying’. Kurdish-Iranian Ghobadi’s film was banned in Iran, but managed to do the rounds of foreign film festivals and even got shown on Australian television. The Tehran underground music scene – which means everybody who hasn’t got a government permit to play music, a process which can take years – is featured in semi-fictional form in Bahman Ghobadi’s film No One Knows about Persian Cats, a title which alludes to a government edict banning cats and dogs in public. ![]()
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