NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT PERSIAN CATS

Presented as part of our week long Persian Film Fest in FOMO Secret Cinema.

NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT PERSIAN CATS is a raw, street-level portrait of Tehran’s underground music scene.

The film follows two young musicians trying to leave Iran so they can perform freely abroad, moving through illegal rehearsal spaces, secret concerts, and the black-market networks that keep independent artists alive. Ghobadi shot much of the film without permits, using real musicians and real locations, giving it a documentary-like urgency. Bands appear as themselves, performing rock, rap, metal, and folk in basements, barns, and abandoned buildings.

The film becomes both a love letter to creativity and a record of how fragile that creativity is under censorship. When it premiered at Cannes, the film won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section. It also angered Iranian authorities, who saw it as a direct challenge to cultural control. Today, it stands as one of the most vivid depictions of artistic resistance ever put on screen. It captures a generation creating in secret, risking everything just to be heard.