‘Bidad’ review: A female singer fights to be heard in potent Tehran-set drama

Dir/scr: Soheil Beiraghi. Iran. 2025. 104mins.

Aspiring singer Seti (Sarvin Zabetian) has a voice that she desires to share with the world. However she is successfully silenced as a younger girl in modern Iran. When Seti defies the regime and sings on the streets of Tehran, her performances go viral. Inevitably, the police muscle in and a tense standoff explodes into violence. Seti is rescued by an unlikely guardian angel, a shaven-headed, tattoed avenue powerful (Amir Jadidi). The fourth movie from Soheil Beiraghi, Bidad (the title interprets as ‘Outcry’) is uncooked and tough across the edges. The writing is scrappy and among the dialogue feels declamatory. Regardless of this, it’s a fiercely potent work bursting with angle and anger on behalf of a technology that won’t simply be silenced.

A well timed image that faucets into the spirit of younger feminine defiance 

A movie that exhibits the unfiltered facet of Gen Z Iran, Bidad’s choice for the principle competitors at Karlovy Range was saved below wraps till the final minute, making certain Beiraghi and his staff might go away the nation safely. It isn’t the primary time the filmmaker (who was investigated by the authorities whereas making this unbiased mission) has fallen foul of the censors. His third characteristic Unpopular (2020) was banned from public displaying in Iran for 2 years. His earlier footage embrace 2018’s Chilly Sweat (launched within the UK as Permission), which loved a wholesome competition run, regardless of vital restrictions from the Iranian authorities. Bidad is a well timed image that faucets into the identical spirit of younger feminine defiance and rebel captured in Mohammad Rasoulof’s Cannes 2024 prizewinner The Seed Of The Sacred Fig.

Girls’s singing voices have been a flashpoint in Iran because the Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation’s spiritual legal guidelines ban ladies from performing solo in public, significantly in entrance of combined audiences. Regardless of this, many have turned to social media as a way to succeed in the general public, sparking a crackdown by the authorities. One younger girl, Zara Esmaili, was arrested in August 2024 after a clip of her performing Amy Winehouse’s ’Again To Black’ went viral. Her whereabouts are nonetheless unknown. It’s unlikely to be a coincidence that one of many first songs that Seti hopes to carry out is ’Again To Black’, though the bar is raided and closed down earlier than she will sing a observe. 

Zabetian brings a propulsive power to her efficiency. Seti is in fixed motion, burning across the nighttime streets of Tehran on her push bike, pausing solely to ship one in every of a number of bluntly written mission statements about her have to sing. And the kinetic digital camera matches her power, weaving by way of underground music venues and tailing her bike rides. The enhancing, nonetheless, feels uneven and abrupt; there’s a sense that a couple of plot factors might need been shed alongside the way in which.

Certainly, Seti’s rise from avenue singer to viral celebrity is just about instantaneous, one in every of a number of elements of the movie that really feel scattershot and hurried. One other is the explosive relationship between Seti and her alcoholic mom, which spirals into recriminations earlier than we get to study a lot about both of them. 

Elsewhere, the image digs into the story with satisfying element – the flirty, playful connection between Seti and her tattooed saviour, who calls himself ’Bebin’ (a broadly used Persian exclamation that interprets as ‘look’) is in contrast to something we’re accustomed to seeing in Iranian cinema, however it’s persuasive and slightly affecting. Jadidi’s efficiency, all street-swagger and slang however virtually childlike below his US rapper trappings, is wildly sudden – the actor is unrecognisable from his central position in Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero.

Seti lets Bebin tattoo her in the course of the first evening they spend collectively, she meets his canine and his prized marijuana plant, they usually chastely share a mattress. The second time they meet, Seti has been damaged by a stint in jail. Her wealthy voice has been shattered and he or she stutters when talking. They sleep subsequent to one another once more, this time on the roof of his truck. And the next day, this sweet-natured thug with angel-wing tattoos does his greatest to assist discover her voice once more.