NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS
dir. Kamran Heidari, 2019
67 mins. Iran.
In Farsi with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, APRIL 2 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 16 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 25 – 7:30 PM

NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS is named after a song by Ibrahim Monsefi, which gets played in several versions during the film. Near the end, its narrator says “how I lived and died is up to me.” Nevertheless, this fictional autobiography tries to reconstruct his life without turning it into a conventional narrative. The film begins with images of the skyscrapers of Bandar Abbas, the city where he was born, taken from a drone. Most of it consists of drifting camera movements, relying heavily on drones, that try to capture the perspective of a person walking slowly while high on heroin. Monsefi died of an overdose of that drug, possibly deliberately. After descending from the sky, the camera takes us to the room where he died.

Heidari and two other screenwriters created a voice-over told by the dead Monsefi. He starts the film by taking about his early life, bringing us to his childhood home and the Hindu temples where he first got a taste of the power of music. As the camera travels around Bandar Abbas, musicians perform Monsefi’s songs in the city’s streets. (It’s reminiscent of the great Brazilian singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso.) While not overtly concerned with race in the same way as DINGOMARO, NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS still showcases the diversity of Southern Iran, emphasizing the coexistence of Islam and Hinduism and the presence of black Iranians.

Mixing elements of fiction and documentary, it tells the story of Monsefi’s life. If the voice-over moves ahead in a fairly linear manner, the images rarely simply illustrate his biography. Instead, the film takes many detours to enjoy the street life of Bandar Abbas and the pleasure of listening to Monsefi’s music. Real and fictional stories of musicians whose early promise – at his peak, Monsefi wrote poetry and acted in addition to his songwriting – vanishes in a haze of drugs may be very common, but NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS is formally unconventional enough that it never feels remotely like a BEHIND THE MUSIC episode. It uses home movie footage gingerly, but its most powerful moment is the ending, where a grainy video of Monsefi performing the title song disappears into flickering electronic snow.

STEVE ERICKSON is a film and music critic who writes for Gay City News, Cineaste, the Nashville Scene, Studio Daily and Kinoscope. He has written and directed 6 short films. His first foray into film programming was Anthology Film Archives’ Mehrdad Oskouei retrospective in February 2018.

KAMRAN HEIDARI was born in Gachsaran, near Shiraz, in 1977. He is a freelance documentary filmmaker and photographer, with an interest in street photography, graffiti and ethno-music. His work focuses on film and photography about the people of Shiraz (Fars Province) and the South of Iran. MY NAME IS NEGAHDAR JAMALI AND I MAKE WESTERNS was screened at many festivals around the world, including the 2013 Busan International Film Festival and Rotterdam.