a meeting between reza go hurry the young cleric and the rock musician. they re both twenty seven they both grew up in mashad. but the two in have a completely different worlds and couldn t be more different still they talk to each other as openly as the constraints of iranian society allow. for three years through so long they meet all sorts of musicians perform here in the park a few years but when we apply for a comment we re turned out and we. usually on the grounds of the way we look because the authorities think will intimidate people what s your opinion which. sometimes you might meet a cleric who doesn t even know all the rules of his own religion but alone how musicians such as yourself think. and that s the problem for us that we know far too little about one another so there s instant animosity and. that is one reason why there are so many hard rock and heavy metal musicians in mashad is the pressure we face. or this i m always being told what i m not allowed to do i
and the show has soundproof too small sound studio in his parents house to make sure the outside world doesn t hear what goes on in here. for me being a heavy metal musician in mashad means living in a dead end of. everything i do i do purely for myself and it s not for public consumption. i only do it because of the pressure i feel. which is more about but that reinforces my belief in what i m doing. if it weren t for social media we wouldn t be here now we musicians are all connected via the internet. before i met the others on facebook i felt very lonely and lost. but when i realized there were many others in my position i realized i wasn t alone. the contact we have with one another and also
a sense of envy and competition is what spurs us on. a jam session with the band out of nowhere in the basement of a tenement block on the city s outskirts someone always keeps watch outside in case the police show up but down here it looks like a band practice anywhere in the world. molly if you play well i play c. is that ok for you. there are thousands of rock musicians here in mashad many come from middle class families like condition religious hardliners reviled the western rock they play. and they see heavy metal as the devil s work.
a bustling city in the northeast of the country one of iran s most significant centers of religious and political power. it s a public holiday the anniversary of the martyrdom of a mom raising a descendant of the islamic prophet muhammad and the eight shiites in. the shrine is managed by an extremely wealthy religious foundation an institution that wields a lot of power not only in mashad but also on the regime in tehran. that. the. crowds of pilgrims mark the public holiday by visiting the shrine every year sees some twenty seven million devout muslims visit. this conservative reactionary city is an unlikely home for a lively underground rock music scene but as we find out appearances can be deceiving.
and will most likely never meet again. and. move the huts one isn t. you know i m sure i want to spend the rest of my life in mashad at one point i ll leave but that doesn t mean i ll forget my home i ll come back one day and work in the cultural sector in music or something similar. or maybe i ll open a music school. but only once i ve gained experience elsewhere i will. show it is a city steeped in both religious devotion and social despair