One bad night at a billiard table is all it takes. Tangna, Amir Naderi's 1973 crime thriller, follows a young hustler through the back alleys of Tehran as two brothers hunt him down, and it is now streaming on K-Time.
What is Tangna about?
Ali Khoshdast is good with a cue, good enough to beat three brothers in the final round of a high-stakes game and to expect them to pay up. They refuse. The argument that follows turns into a fight, Ali and his friend Reza on one side, the brothers on the other, and when it is over one of the brothers is dead and Ali is running. From that moment the city closes in on him. The two surviving brothers track him through narrow lanes, rubbish dumps and ruined lots, and Ali, who needs money to get out of Tehran, has nowhere safe to go. He sends his mother, sister and brother to his aunt's house so the brothers cannot reach them, then turns to his fiancee Parvaneh and her friend Ashraf for the help he needs to disappear.
About the cast
Saeed Rad plays Ali, the hustler whose winning streak turns into a death sentence, and the film rests on his restless, physical presence. Nouri Kasraei appears as Parvaneh and Shahrzad as Ashraf, the two women Ali turns to when the streets run out, with Mehri Vadadian as his mother. Enayat Bakhshi and Mohammad Eskandari are among the brothers on his trail, with Ali Dehghan and Hassan Raziani also in the cast.
Context & significance
Tangna, a title that translates roughly as the narrow pass or the tight spot, arrived in 1973 at a moment when a handful of Iranian directors were pulling genre cinema toward the street. Naderi shot it as a pursuit film: a man with a few hours to find money and a way out, filmed in the margins of the capital rather than on studio sets. The crime and thriller elements are real, with a chase that runs through most of the picture's 102 minutes, but the drama underneath is about a working-class family exposed by one reckless act. Ali's worry for his mother and siblings, and his dependence on the women in his life, give the chase its weight.
Watching Tangna on Ktime
Tangna is available on K-Time in its original Persian. Create or sign in to a free K-Time account to watch; the page itself can be read without logging in, and the service offers a Farsi interface designed for Persian speakers living outside Iran.