A guitar case carried through Tehran can look like nothing at all, or like evidence. Bahman Ghobadi's 2009 feature follows two young musicians who have learned that difference the hard way.
What is Kasi Az Gorbehaye Irani Khabar Nadareh about?
Negar and Ashkan are indie musicians in the capital with recordings, ambition, and no legal way to perform. A concert date abroad gives them a deadline. Working through a motor-mouthed fixer who deals in permits, passports and cheerfully improbable promises, they set out to recruit a band and secure travel documents before the window closes. The search carries them through the city's hidden scene: a padded basement, a rooftop where a rapper works above the traffic, a barn where a heavy band plays to livestock.
The K-Time take
What keeps the film alive nearly two decades on is its refusal to treat music as decoration. Ghobadi builds whole sequences around a single track, cutting the city over it until the song works as reportage rather than soundtrack. The two leads carry that weight: Shaghaghi and Koshanejad are not performing anguish, they are performing exhaustion and stubbornness, which is far more persuasive. Behdad supplies the comic engine and the sharpest sting. The looseness costs it, and viewers wanting tight plotting may find the middle stretch wandering. On its own terms it stays one of the most honest portraits of a generation making art in the margins.
About the cast
Negar Shaghaghi and Ashkan Koshanejad play the central duo, with a lived-in, unforced quality that feels closer to eavesdropping on real lives than to studio acting. Hamed Behdad, a widely recognised Iranian character performer, rounds out the trio. The bands seen rehearsing feel caught in their element rather than staged.
Context & significance
Ghobadi turns his camera here on contemporary urban Tehran, and the film moves with a restless, handheld urgency, as if it were racing the same clock as its characters. A 2009 release, it holds within its 106 minutes a broad cross-section of the period's Iranian popular music, from indie rock and rap to metal and fusion. Its Persian title translates into English as No One Knows About Persian Cats.
Watching Kasi Az Gorbehaye Irani Khabar Nadareh on K-Time
The title streams on K-Time, the Persian-focused service built for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi interface and a catalogue organised around Iranian cinema. Reading this page needs nothing; watching requires a K-Time account, so log in with your free account and it plays on TV, phone, tablet or browser.