IRANgeles

Michael Keller’s low budget, self-produced film is a unpretentiously likeable effort that perhaps derives its strength from being based on the writer/director’s personal experience (Keller makes an amusing appearance as the peremptory theatre director). How else, one wonders, would anyone know so much about Los Angeles’ close-knit Iranian community?

Keller cutely works the mother of all star-crossed love stories, Romeo and Juliet, into his tale of a young Kansas wannabe actor (Dan Wells) who on arriving in LA,  meets Kambiz (Noah Knight), a thoroughly Americanized young Iranian and falls in love with one of his acquaintances, Sherry (Carolena Sabah) who is closely guarded by her traditional-minded parents. Familiar generational and cross-cultural conflicts ensue. 

Keller is no Shakespeare and does not attempt to be but the film charms largely because of his lightly amusing script and the infectious enthusiasm with which the cast bring it to life, the boyishly-handsome Wells, who has since gone on to a healthy career in television, being for a fledgling production like this, an almost too-good-to-be-true find.

 

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