Animated over filmed performance rather than drawn from scratch, Tehran Taboo sees the Iranian capital as two cities stacked on each other. Ali Soozandeh directed this 2017 drama, a German and Austrian production of a little over ninety minutes.
What is Tehran Taboo about?
Three women and a young musician cross the city on separate errands, and the film stays with each until their routes overlap. One needs a signature she cannot simply ask for. Another wants a future the rules around her do not hand out freely. The musician carries a night that will not stay behind him. The city holds the strands together: an official Tehran of permissions and prohibitions sitting on a private Tehran of arrangements, favours and quiet workarounds. Traffic, stairwells and waiting rooms get equal weight, because the film cares less about incident than about what each character must negotiate to get through an ordinary day.
The Ktime take
The decision to animate is what makes this film what it is. Because the performances were filmed first, the actors keep what matters in close-up: the weight of a glance, the half-second before an answer, the way a body holds itself in a room where the wrong word costs something. The city, meanwhile, is released from anything a camera could plausibly have caught on those streets, so the backgrounds carry the remembered quality of a place described from far away. That doubling earns the technique rather than treating it as novelty, though the argument itself is not subtle, and viewers who want ambiguity may find the framing pressed hard. Its best passages are the smallest: a favour asked, priced in something other than money, granted with a shrug. The ensemble plays those scenes without melodrama.
About the cast
The cast includes Arash Marandi, Alireza Bayram, Siir Eloglu, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, Klaus Ofczarek, Morteza Tavakoli, Gernot Polak and Hasan Ali Mete, all filmed on camera before the animation was built over them.
Context & significance
Credited to Germany and Austria, the film sits in K-Time's catalogue under both Drama and Animation, unusual for a story told in a wholly adult realist register. Animation here is a production method and a way of picturing a city, not a signal about audience. It belongs to a small group of Persian-language works made outside Iran.
Watching Tehran Taboo on Ktime
Tehran Taboo streams on K-Time with a Persian dub; Persian subtitles are not attached at present. This page is free to read, playback needs a K-Time account, and the interface, search and catalogue are built in Farsi for viewers in the diaspora.