A director and his companions visit a gifted singer in a Kurdish village, where a secret yearns to break free.
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Jafar Panahi’s short follows him, his daughter and her theater-producer friend to a remote Kurdish village to visit a woman, a preternaturally gifted singer, whose traditional family refuses to allow her to perform publicly. What they find is a secret to be kept hidden, but yearning to break free.
"Jafar Panahi, the award-winning Iranian director known for 'Taxi Tehran' and other productions, brings his gaze to the story of a young woman who was forbidden to sing by Iranian authorities. In 'Hidden', Panahi makes use of two cell phones and a good dose of expression - or in this case repression - cultural to give voice to a woman who lost her voice due to her country's regime. This story ends up getting close to the director's own life, who was forbidden from making films in Iran. Because of this, it becomes even more inspiring. Jafar Panahi reveals that he will not stop making his art and brings in his productions a little bit of what it is to be marginalized within a profession and/or a specific region. The short film originally is part of the collection 'Celles qui chantent', from a program of the Opéra de Paris, where the female voice is the focus of small films made by Panahi, Sergey Loznitsa, Julie Deliquet and Karim Moussaoui."