Bards from the land of Sun (Damout) from Payam Yousef on Vimeo.
“Bards from the Land of Sun” is a short ethnographic film on dotar players in Iran’s Khorasan region.” It was screened in its complete form at Harvard VES school on May 3rd 2019. The current version posted here has omitted scenes/sequences with potentially sensitive material as a precaution. While this negatively impacts the flow and context of the film, nonetheless I hope this limited access can be beneficial to a broader viewership.
Khorasan is Iran’s largest region located on the country’s Northeastern periphery bordering Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, functioning as a bridge into Central Asia. Legacies of historically fluctuating borders make Khorasan an ethnically diverse area consisting of Persians (Shiite and Sunni), Turkic tribes, Turkmens, and Kurmanji Kurds. The musical cultures of all these ethnolinguistic groups are intimately tied to Khorasan’s emblematic instrument, the dotar (a two-string long neck lute). The dotar is performed by virtuoso bards called baxshi-s. Through musical performance baxshi-s play an important role as poets, story tellers, keepers of oral histories, performers of epics, and symbols of ethnic identity. This film is a modest snapshot of some of the most important culture bearers of this instrument in Iran: Alireza Soleimani, Mohammad Yeganeh, Hossein Damanpak, and Osman Mohammad Parast.