Bandar Band

                
Director:  Manijeh Hekmat
Year:  2020
Rating: 7.5
Country: Iran
The most remarkable thing about this Iranian film is that it was made at all. It is an amazing story. Female director Manijeh Hekmat (Women's Prison, Three Women) had plans to make a road movie of three friends going to Tehran from an outer province to perform at a coffee club competition with hopes that this would springboard them to possibly play outside of Iran. This in itself is interesting because the band is made up of two men and a female singer, who is very pregnant. Along the way they would have issues in getting to Tehran. Then Mother Nature intervened in a big way.




In 2019 huge rains hit the country and much of it was under water and devastated. The kind of thing we never even hear about in the West. So Hekmat had to make a decision whether to postpone the film but she instead saw this as a fabulous backdrop to it. Getting to Tehran through the flood was the story. And it's incredible to watch - roads washed out, bridges washed out, the terrain covered by water as far as the eye can see. And they go forward in their van. Helping people along the way, handing out aid to those now living in tents, stopping off to see a friend whose village has been destroyed. The friend asks the pregnant Mitra (Pegah Ahangarani) why did you come. "I wanted to borrow a dress for my performance tonight" and then both realizing the absurdity of it just begin laughing. "All my clothes are gone. My house is gone". And laugh some more.




It becomes more than their story but a story of Iran. Of adversity and spirit. A man playing the violin on the rooftop of a wrecked home just as we see in Ukraine today. Music has magic. Further on they run into a group of men in the road singing and dancing to a Wailing Song "The flood wanted to make us weep. But we built levees and made the flood cry". They get stopped by the cops and have to sing to prove they are on their way to Tehran to perform. They make another stop for Navid (Reza Koolaghani) to pick up his beloved guitar and he finds it floating in the water like a lost orphan. His friend Amir (Amir Hossein Taheri) goes to get it and Navid stops him "It is a raft now. Let it go". He is heartbroken. They have such dreams. Tehran, Berlin, Paris, Rio. But these days Iran breaks the dreams of the young. The director said they constantly had to improvise and re-write the story. It is beautifully shot, lyrical and full of music.