“SANTOURI”

SYNOPSIS: Ali, the santour wizard and popular young singer,suddenly looses control of reins of life at the height of his fame and success and falls to ruin.
he claims,”All my misfortunes started when the great love of my life, my wife Hanieh,left me.” But hanieh leaves after Ali has been in the throes of his destructive addiction for quite some time.

Director: Dariush Mehrjui

From celebrated Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui (The Cow; The Cycle) comes this
contemporary drama about a musician who plays the santour, an ancient stringed instrument. Unfortunately,Santouri is also addicted to heroin, which takes an
emotional and physical toll. His life takes a tragic downward spiral after authorities ban him from playing in public and his wife leaves him.
Master filmmaker Mehrjui has the distinction of being censored by both the Shah of Iran and the Islamic fundamentalists that followed in the wake of the Revolution. That he has survived and continues to make films is a testament to his talent, fortitude, and influence on younger generations of filmmakers. Still
unafraid of controversy after 30 years of Iranian filmmaking, Mehrjui suggests in his film that his country’s current cultural repression is connected to its rampant drug addition.

LA WEEKLY review by Robert Koehler
SANTOURI (THE MUSIC MAN) On his way to becoming the Grand Old Man of Iranian cinema, something interesting has happened to Dariush Mehrjui.
From his stunning 1969 sophomore feature, The Cow (the first modern Iranian film to reach Western audiences), to The Postman (1972) and The Cycle (1974), Mehrjui was filmmaker enemy No. 1 of the shah’s censors, and deeply influential on the generation of filmmakers that came of age after the Islamist revolution. How times — and Mehrjui — have changed:
Following a fine series of mostly conventionally made films about women, Mehrjui’s latest, Santouri (The Music Man), shows that he’s absorbed the influences of the youngsters in its story about Ali (Bahram Radan), a popular singer-songwriter and player of the santoor (an ancient stringed instrument played with two small mallets) and the emotional and physical price he pays for his heroin addiction. There’s a loose, fluid rhythm that courses through the film like an elixir, especially in the freeform way Mehrjui shifts between Ali’s devastating downward course — set off when he is banned by authorities from playing in public — and his happier past and marriage to fellow musician Hanieh (the incandescent Golshifteh Farahani). Far from serving as some sort of screed against the excesses of a younger generation of artists, Santouri suggests that
Iran’s current cultural repression and rampant drug addiction are no
mere coincidence.

Nima Pictures & Iranian Film Society Presents An Mehrfaraz Film Production “SANTOURI THE MUSIC MAN” a film by Dariush Mehrjui
Bahram Radan, Golshifteh Farahani, Masoud Raygan, Roya Teymorian, Maede Tahmasebi, Nader Soleymani, Mahyar Pourhesaabi