THE AMATEUR REVOLUTIONARY
This intoxicating coming of age tale revolves around Kami, a young man who abandons the port city of his youth for the bright lights of the big city, Teheran, where he falls in love with a daring and beautiful race car driver. Their love leads him to underground parties in the depths of the metropolis, to secret pockets of liberty in the oppressive cloak of the regime, but also to the harsh consequences of freedom brusquely revoked.
In the strange building owned by his aunt, an actress whose star has dimmed, he befriends a tough and elderly disgraced judge, a blood-thirsty cat and a shy homosexual with a dangerous yen for men in uniform.
When Kami buys a laptop the fragile balance in the building shifts out of control and the horizons of the Internet beckon to each of the reclusive tenants with all the freedom that they are denied outside, on the streets whose names are constantly being changed and from the walls where the expressions of the Fathers of the Revolution bear down upon them.
From the black market, where you can buy everything that's forbidden to sell, to the public squares where adulterous women are executed; from the towering skyscrapers to the villages hidden from sight; between euphoria and paranoia a portrait of modern Iran is exposed, rife with contradictions, where the horror is addictive yet the taste of freedom immeasurably more so. A place more distant than the moon, yet its magnetism is such that it controls the ebb and flow of the heart.
