Musicians in Iran

A journey through through a country which has become the focus on international attention: Iran, a place where music is also a political issue.

In the first part, Leonidas Antonopoulos visits Tehran, a big city where reality plays hide-and-seek with prohibitions and where the voice of youth is expressed through rap, rock and even heavy metal, along with the great voices of classical Iranian music. There, he meets singer Sahram Nazeri, a man who renewed classical Iranian music, and also the all-women group Rozaneh. He meets the first generation of Iranian rappers recording their songs clandestinely, the first death metal group of the country, Seven Deadly Sins, who are obliged to give concerts in front of a seated-only audience and are not permitted to sing their lyrics in public. He also interviews the first mixed pop group, the successful Arian.

In the second part, Leonidas Antonopoulos leaves Teheran by car together with the Kurdish tambour virtuoso Ali Akban Moradi, on a journey behind "the curtain." At Tabriz, in Iranian Azerbaijan, he is introduced to the centuries-old tradition of the Caucasian "asiks" through a meeting with Asik Hasan. He visits a Sufi "teke" (lodge), for a sensational musical and religious ritual, where the congregation is led to the verge of ecstasy and together with Moradi, he attends weddings and celebrations in Iranian Kurdistan which are quite similar to the ones we find in Greece. The ages-old sounds of the Ahl-e Haqq brotherhood, to which Moradi belongs, make up the soundtrack of a trip to unfamiliar places of an unknown country.