None of Your Business

Bandar Abbas sits on the Strait of Hormuz. Anyone who has read the city’s name in the news this year knows it as a port, a military target, a point on a map marked with arrows. Over half a million people live there, and in those images, they don’t appear.

There’s a constant decision about which images of a place get made and which don’t. They aren’t necessarily false, but they show a fragment. Even an image has an edge, and mostly we no longer see who chose it.

None of Your Business sets another image beside it. Not the right one, not the complete one, simply another one. The film tells the story of the life and afterlife of Ebrahim Monsefi, a musician and poet from Bandar Abbas. Monsefi was never an official figure. He sang his songs with a few chords, mostly alone, and never recorded them in a studio. He also knew music from elsewhere in the world, from flamenco to Indian music, and wove it into the dialects of the south. Monsefi died in 1997 at fifty-two, and his recordings were only discovered afterward, gradually. In Hormozgan, people call him the Nima of the South. What moves me about him is how something can remain that never had a secure place to begin with.

Kamran Heidari doesn’t tell this like a conventional biography. He gathers traces, faces, old recordings, and voices that sometimes contradict one another. We come to know Monsefi through others, and he stays strangely close and unreachable at the same time.

One choice in the film stays with me in particular. Many shots are aerial. Together with Monsefi’s voice, they create, for a moment, the impression that the dead man himself is looking down on his city. Who is actually looking here? Who is telling whom? Bandar Abbas is never just a backdrop. The city itself is a participant. It holds on to something, in its walls and in the way people sit together. The film shows almost no significant buildings and no monuments, and yet it tells the story of a place. To me, that’s an architectural question. Memory lives not only in monuments, but also in pathways, in shadows, in sound.

I’m from Iran myself, but not from this region. For me too, the film opens up a space I don’t fully know.

My first question wasn’t which film to show. My first question was which images are missing. The same happens just as quickly around asylum and flight, pain and loss on one side, the success story on the other. Both are true, and both remain too small. A person carries more with them than their wounds. The music in None of Your Business carries exactly that. You don’t need to understand every word to hear a longing, or a weariness. It can open a shared space before language sorts everything out.

The title sounds, at first, like a refusal. What business is it of yours? And yet the film does the opposite. It approaches a person who is no longer there, through the memories of others, without claiming to possess him or to tell his story in full.

That’s why I want to show this film at Kino Asyl. Not to say, this is Iran. No film can do that, and neither can I. I don’t want to produce pity. Maybe it’s enough if something is there afterward that wasn’t there before. Maybe that’s the kind of cinema that interests me, one that brings us close to something for a while and then lets go again. This film doesn’t explain Iran. It makes something of it audible.