The Crowd (جماعت): Defiant Joy
by Karenna Blomberg
A vertical video, clearly taken on a cellphone, of a chic millennial apartment. We pan over a group of friends dancing, goofing off, giggling. There is food and drink. One girl is singing.
The opening scene of The Crowd resembles the kind of thing you could find on the camera roll of most people between the ages of 21 and 35 today. But by the end of the film, even this typical scenario feels like a statement of resilience.
The Crowd is the feature film debut by Iranian writer and director Sahand Kabiri. I managed to catch it at the 2025 Seattle International Film Festival, where it went on to win the New Directors Grand Jury Prize.
The film follows a group of friends in their mid-twenties, Raman, Hamed, Shirin and Ziz, all living in the Iranian capital city of Tehran. Still recovering from the death of another friend, Tondar, Raman has decided to leave Tehran—and the rest of the crew is determined to throw him an unforgettable goodbye party in an abandoned garage building that Hamed recently inherited.
Blending a sentimental tone with a carefree cast of characters, The Crowd is a simple but thematically meaty story accented by Kabiri’s sharp, no-nonsense direction. While Iran has long been regarded in Western media as a singularly repressive, conservative, and “dangerous” country, Kabiri is determined to showcase both the vibrance of Tehran’s youth culture and the striking normalcy of Iranian life. No matter their nationality, young adults want to have fun, and that is the metaphorical sun The Crowd revolves around. Raman, Shirin, and their friends are flirts and shit-talkers, facing both the oppressive conservatism outside their door and the lingering grief hanging among them alongside revolutionary joy.
While the film feels questionably light on plot and material at times, at other times that choice feels right, as it lets the characters’ personalities and interactions guide the story. For instance: the closest thing there is to a main antagonist of the film is Hamed’s much more conservative older brother, who doesn’t want them using the garage for their farewell party. Although this doesn’t sound particularly stirring, I think because of his focus on rich interactions between different characters, ultimately Kabiri manages to get away with it.
This may be because he makes the smart narrative decision to never fully, directly call out the real foil of the film or call it out for exactly what it is. Societal conservatism—and its effects and aftereffects—surround the characters and the story like ghosts but are never given a name. The real point of any underground party scene is to quiet inhibitions and defy overbearing systems of power, and The Crowd aptly follows suit.
A fresh reminder that the resilience of youth always persists and a lost battle is not a lost war, The Crowd covers the general idea of themes like oppression and conservatism without ever feeling their weight. The events of the film leading up to Raman’s farewell are mostly somber and, at times, depressing. But Kabiri’s understated take on Tehran’s rave scene acts as an excellent metaphor to underline a hopeful ideal: that the conservative world is slowly but surely dying away and will one day make way for something new, and so much more fun.