Get the latest gossip
‘Bidad’ Review: A Young Woman Raises Her Voice, Fighting for the Right to Sing in a Daring Iranian Drama
Director Soheil Beiraghi introduces a young female character the likes of which Iran typically tries to suppress: a woman who refuses to be silenced.
Whereas Hollywood has told and retold “A Star Is Born” so many times as to make trite its plot — of a preternaturally gifted young female singer whose career is simultaneously encouraged and complicated by an alcoholic has-been — Iranian director Soheil Beiraghi ’s bold, risky and occasionally clunky “ Bidad ” depicts how radically different that trajectory might be in the filmmaker’s home country. More overtly critical of the oppressive regime than most Iranian cinema, but also more traditional in its storytelling than recent films from Panahi and Rasoulof, “Bidad” presents itself as a straightforward aspirational artist story (with a surprisingly chaste bad-boy romance running parallel). Living at home with her chronically inebriated mom, whose close-cropped blond coif (almost surely a hat tip to expat Iranian rapper Justina) suggests the rebellious spirit that marks their household, Seti wants nothing more than to make music.
Or read this on Variety
