TUNE IN TO RADIO DREAMS

It’s difficult to imagine a more jarring clash of cultures than in this sweet indie story from Iranian-born writer-director Babak Jalali. A tiny, Farsi-language radio station in San Francisco has arranged an on-air meeting between transplanted Afghan rock band (played by the actual band Kabul Dreams) and the heavy-metal gods of Metallica.

I don’t know if Jalali has spent any time watching WKRP in Cincinnati reruns, but PARS-FM has a similarly eclectic staff, most of whom would rather be doing something else.

Hamid (Mohsen Namjoo) is a frustrated writer with a mane of white hair and a hand-sanitizer fixation, whose idea of ideal programming is a talk on Salvadoran

poet Roque Dalton.

The station’s owner, meanwhile, thinks one of the members of Kabul Dreams would make a better wrestler than a musician, and sets out to train him. His beautiful daughter (think Loni Anderson but Persian) has another band member falling hard. Meanwhile, Metallica is conspicuously absent.

Jalali ushers us through the day in a well-crafted 93 minutes, sometimes cutting away from the station’s activities to show a U.S. news outlet interviewing Hamid about his life and career. And we’re treated to live commercials for local ethnic restaurants and a bizarre listeners-stories segment called “Iranian Days,” in which Hamid switches to a falsetto to tell the tale of an immigrant troubled by the sudden and mysterious appearance of the penguin outside her door.

It wouldn’t do to say whether Metallica ever makes an appearance, but whether they do or not is no more relevant than whether Kabul Dreams’ trio finds true love or switches from bass guitar to wrestling. It’s all in a day’s broadcast at PARS-FM, and well worth tuning in for.