Departure can be mourning, but departure can also be celebration. If there ever were a feverish, urgent allegory for present times, it’s Sahand Kabiri’s quietly defiant first feature The Crowd (جماعت), whose short 70-minute runtime never betrays the urgency of its message: that infighting will destroy a just cause, but in overcoming this, that the people will always win. The film bears traces to the Iranian greats in its slices of humour while also rooting itself in a new sense of voice, also remaining subtly queer, but never obviously so. The film enjoyed its world premiere in the Bright Future section of the 2025 International Rotterdam Film Festival and most recently screened in competition at Inside Out, the Toronto 2SLGBTQIA+ Film Festival.
The film’s opening scenes, shown to us as a personal video diary, sets us up for what is to follow. Raman (Farz Modiri) is in the process of a tearful goodbye as he prepares to leave the country, whereas his friends prepare a farewell rager to celebrate his bittersweet departure. Hamed (Keyvan Mohammadi), insinuated to be Raman’s partner, offers up his family’s warehouse for the task, only to be confronted by his conservative elder brother, who disapproves of his so-called lifestyle choices. The film is queer in several of its other elements, including the nuanced gender expression of various characters, suggesting certain liberties made possible by their small group.
The Crowd is understated in many ways, bearing traces to the Iranian greats in its slices of humour that punctuate the seriousness of its subject matter while also rooting itself in a new sense of voice. Kabiri never places us at the centre of an active conflict, other than the brother’s attempts to stop the party. Danger lingers heavily at the peripheries, where it threatens to creep in; we see a very particular set of emergent struggles at play, ones that still have to do with the broader human rights movement in Iran, niched down for this group of young upper-middle-class Iranians who are afforded freedoms, but only within a certain bound.
Among the larger group scenes, the conversations ping-pong realistically between members of friends, a testament to the fluidity of the ensemble and cinematography by Hamed Hosseini Sangari, which ensures a constant connection between the group. The film’s greatest strength is its overwhelming sense of intimacy and insistence on putting forth the expression of this new generation on full display, showing us what life is like inside the safety of closed walls and amongst dear friends. An accidental (and perhaps preventable, so goes the argument) death of one of the friends remains unresolved, threatening to disrupt the group’s cohesion. The question lingers low over them all: is it appropriate to celebrate just as others are mourning? Will grief for a cause weigh down the continued fight?
The choppy, more unconventional narrative flow is not for everyone: we don’t spend much time getting to know each individual character, instead focusing on their role in the group and also what they stand for. But for the purposes of Kabiri’s story, it works: he lets the story inhale and exhale, moving from slower scenes into a later hypnotic party sequence in which the warehouse bathed in neon lights and several members of the group dance their worries away. We are only privy to slices of their lives, but it is all we need. The importance of the work is the preparation for the party, not the party itself, because getting there is a feat in and of itself.
