Radio Dreams

Existential feelings like anxiety, loneliness and our purpose in the world are very powerful, we have all felt them. If they are conveyed in the right way then we can sympathise with the characters and empathise with them during their struggles. Unfortunately this movie did not provide me the opportunity to do this.

This movie was let down in two ways, the material and the characters. There was not enough material to make a movie. Vacuum cleaning and showing the same thing over and over again are two examples. Secondly, Boshra Dastournezhad's character who was the main character was going through an existential crisis. He had moved to the US expecting more, expecting to be able to make positive change, which is admirable. However, his despair was lost for me in the fact I didn't like him, and thus didn't care for him or his despair. No connection was built with him as there was nothing to like about him. All the other characters where one dimensional so there was nothing to be gained from them either.

The writer tried to manufacturer a connection with the audience through the prospect of Metallica. But as the movie slowly dragged on I lost interest in whether or not Metallica would show up anyway.

See Into the Wild or Lost in Translation if you would like to see an existential movie where we connect with the characters and there is actually enough material to make a movie.

Saw this movie at the Rotterdam film festival (IFFR.COM) 2016. It was part of the official Tiger Award Competition, due to a new policy this year being confined to only eight movies. The latter (competition = festival's flagship) inevitably gives rise to high expectations. Nevertheless, I wonder why this film was chosen. Other festival visitors reasoned along similar lines, and it ended thus on a middle-of-the-road 76th place (out of 178) for the audience award. That said, it was not bad after all, sort of entertaining in its own way.

I must admit that I expected too much, but not all my time was wasted. The movie provided for interesting insights in running a radio station, be it run by Iranians or any other nationality for that matter. The continuous tension between financial issues versus running ads versus providing for interesting content, is relevant for any broadcasting and other forms of publicity too.

Minimal time was devoted to how and why these Iranians and others from various countries left their homes and how much effort it took to integrate. That was apparently not the primary topic of this movie. I think I misconstrued the synopsis on the festival website, and assumed this film intended to study contemporary issues around integration and assimilation of people from abroad. In hindsight the synopsis focused on music and musicians rather than immigration politics after all, so I stand corrected.

This is an existential movie that, in part, gently examines the mindset of people who have moved to the US from certain parts of the middle East (primarily Iran and Afghanastan). It uses the unlikely vehicle of a Farsi-speaking Iranian radio station in San Francisco (PARS Radio) as its main locale. The station is a surreal place, like the old WKRP in Cincinnati TV show, but instead of kooky American stereotypes this radio station is inhabited by kooky middle Easterners.

The distracted head of the station is more interested wrestling than radio. His daughter, a frosty and remote fashion plate, is the station's business manager. She seems to have captured her unfair share of local Iranian advertisers including a dermatologist specializing in removing unwanted hair from Iranian women and a fast-food restaurant in a food court specializing in Afghan and Iranian cuisine. Perhaps these are nods to Iranian assimilation in the US.

But this movie really revolves around the fictional Hamid Royani, a noted poet and a truly masterful literary writer in Iran, reduced to working as the program director at this tiny radio station filled with misfits. He single-handedly tries to maintain his country's cultural heritage against the insurmountable odds of America's highly assimilating, melting-pot culture.

The entire movie captures one day in the station's existence when a Metallica-inspired Afghan rock-and-roll band that Royani has flown to the US from Kabul is supposed to appear on the air with Metallica in a jam session. This is Royani's dream: a celebration of international cultural mixing. He's a dreamer living a nightmare, surrounded by the leaden (from his own perspective). In fact, I think it's hard to tell which parts of this movie take place only in Royani's mind. I'm sure that part of it does.

The people surrounding Royani at the station, mostly interns, spend a lot of time looking into the camera with blank stares. I assume that's the filmmaker telling us how empty these people's lives have become as expats living in the US. (All in all, you're just a brick in the wall.)

There are funny parts to the movie. There's confusion. There is pathos. There are beautiful moments. But mostly, this movie trundles at a truly glacial pace, perhaps reflecting the director's feeling about life. Or not. In many ways this is an art film minus the art. It's the sort of thing I'd expect to get from a film student just starting out.

I saw this film as part of the Camera Cinema Club in San Jose, CA. The audience consists of longtime film patrons accustomed to seeing many different sorts of films through the club. This movie left a lot of them scratching their heads.

I am really sorry if I didn't receive the message but I seriously did not get it at all... maybe it might be some cultural gap because this did not seem to be a comedy to me at all... too complicated, too many plot lines, at the end of a story I already forgot its beginning... It seemed to be interesting at first but it was overly complicated and heavy ... It reminded me of movies as Only God forgives us (Cam D., Ray Gos.) or Heil Caesar(George C. Chan Tat... ) Huge Halooo around it but not really worth it. I am sorry producers, but actors did some nice jobs, pretty much credible way of acting... It might seemed like Lars 'es personal promotion