Radio Dreams, winner of the 45th Rotterdam International Film Festival’s Tiger Award, is the newest feature film from Iranian-British director Babak Jalali (Frontier Blues). Radio Dreams creates the strange yet very real world of PARS-FM - a Farsi-language radio station broadcasting from the heart of San Francisco. The story unfolds over a single day as the station’s program manager, Hamid - a brilliant, misunderstood Iranian writer (played by the “Iranian Bob Dylan” Mohsen Namjoo) - prepares for a triumphant broadcast - a live performance pairing Metallica and Kabul Dreams, Afghanistan’s first rock band. Meanwhile, Hamid must juggle a dysfunctional mix of on-air talent, station managers, and performers while fending off the owner’s plans to wrest control of the station. With gentle humor and a deadpan eye towards cultural differences, Radio Dreams brings to life the sometimes-bizarre experience of immigrants pursuing dreams in the U.S. A perfect mixture of honesty, art, and socio-political topicality served up as an ingenious, offbeat transmission.
