Search The Archive
A chaotic day in the life of a Farsi-language San Francisco radio station waiting on a visit from Metallica.
Hamid Royani has a special event booked for the little Persian radio station he programs: Metallica is scheduled to stop by the studio to jam with Kabul Dreams, a rock band from Afghanistan. For Royani, a writer who immigrated to the US from Iran, the two bands coming together to play music symbolises the potential for peace between the two countries following the horrors of the conflicts in Afghanistan. But first, the megastar metal band needs to show up.
Winner of a Tiger Award at Rotterdam Film Festival, Babak Jalali's Radio Dreams is a dryly humorous, bittersweet story tackling themes of artistic integrity, commercialism and cultural identity. Mohsen Namjoo, a US-based Iranian folk musician often dubbed "the Bob Dylan of Iran", shines as Royani, with his shock of frizzy Einstein-esque hair, while Kabul Dreams feature as themselves; and let's just say Metallica fans won't be disappointed.
"Under Jalali's confident stewardship, the circumscribed world of the struggling radio station becomes the perfect microcosmic stage on which to deftly play out global tensions of profit vs. art, East vs. West, isolationism vs. assimilation, and pragmatism vs. idealism." – Variety
