Bahman Ghobadi’s five feature films are impassioned cries for justice on the part of the dispossessed and those whose lives remain unseen. While the first four films all take place in Ghobadi’s native Kurdistan, his latest work brings the same passion to present-day Tehran. Ghobadi’s ouevre to date is an extraordinary example of cinema dancing on the abyss.

Born in 1969 in Iranian Kurdistan, Ghobadi moved to Tehran in 1992 and started a career as an industrial photographer. After studying film at the Iranian Broadcasting College, he began shooting short documentaries on 8mm, an experience that led directly to the creation of his first feature film, A Time for Drunken Horses. The film’s immediate international success not only made Ghobadi a prominent name in Iranian filmmaking – alongside Jafar Panahi and Samira Makhmalbaf – but also marked him as a pioneer of Kurdish cinema.

Ghobad’s subsequent three films similarly featured the lives of the Kurds – whose land is divided among Iran, Iraq and Turkey – and their music. Inspired by the raucousness and manic energy of Kurdish music and, by extension, Kurdish culture as a whole, Ghobadi’s first four films present a rich and moving tapestry of the recent history of the Kurds after the Iranian Revolution, their suffering at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and their provisional state under the Kurdistan Regional Government. With a population of at least 30 million, the Kurds are the largest stateless ethnic group. It is music that provides the link between these works and Ghobadi’s latest, No One Knows About Persian Cats. This portrait of the uncertain fortunes of the Iranian musicians and youth chafing under the restrictions of their government was finished just weeks before the Iranian presidential election in June 2009, and it foretells the massive unrest that the disputed election results would produce.

Although all of Ghobadi’s feature films are fictional, he has described his films as “documentaries that have a lot of fiction in them,” since he derives the characters from his (mostly) non-professional actors and his plots from their actual lives. At the same time, Ghobadi combines these semi-documentary elements with heartfelt melodrama and occasionally hints of vaster mythical and eschatological themes.

Life and death, music and humor: Ghobadi’s cinema is driven by that vitality found at the extremes, and it is fitting that the films are largely populated by children and young people. For all the direness of the predicaments of those onscreen, these are films full of life, whether they are exuberant or despairing, or encompassing both of these poles.

Ghobadi’s films are full of near constant motion, with characters always on the move – travelling, performing, working or struggling to survive. Throughout, Ghobadi’s camera remains close to them, bringing us a precious glimpse at a large region of the world and an entire culture rarely seen on our screens. – David Pendleton