A Portrait of Youth in Tehran: Hooria Ahmadi’s Video Diaries

This July marked two months since twenty-three-year-old Hooria Ahmadi last uploaded her fifth monthly video diary on YouTube. In the series titled Tehran Youth Diaries, she captures her life and that of her friends in Tehran on a vintage handycam. Their aesthetic is reminiscent of early vlogs on Myspace during the Y2K era for a new internet generation, which would usher in the confessional-style videos of the noughties by young millennial bloggers on YouTube. This early internet energy has changed into overproduced content, among which exist perpetually online dank memes and sardonic reels like a Beiruti saxophonist playing Afro house on the rooftop as Iranian missiles flew towards Israel in June in retaliation of Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear bases. While Iran and Israel have been in a proxy war for decades, Iran has been in open conflict with Israel since October 2023 after the latter began its Genocide against Palestinians, which continues unabated. Amidst this state of war, Ahmadi’s camera was momentarily abandoned and her YouTube silent.

It took her some months to recover from being in this situation of pure survival, she said, after she started uploading again earlier this month. The camera demands a certain kind of emotional effort and performance, both for the one filming and the ones being filmed. This is so even within the more informal documentary style Ahmadi works with; in an earlier episode her friend hid her face and told Ahmadi to stop recording as she turned the lens away to a pile of trash on the street. It was more heightened last June. “During the war I did not have any mental or physical potential to shoot anything,” Ahmadi reflected. She adds,“My friends and I were trying to spend time with each other because we thought maybe it would be helpful for our mental health.”

In the sixth and latest episode, her friends sat around eating ice cream during the crossfire. In a surreal moment—both for them and for us watching—they laughed resignedly about the possibilities of this being their last frozen dessert. These were the early days when Ahmadi was still attempting to capture their lives during the war, compelling the camera to bear the weight of being a witness. Even before the war, painting a portrait of the life of young Iranians listening to rap and wearing clothes they have designed themselves that go beyond the restrictions of the female dress code was not quite permissible. When she spoke with me right before the war started, she had said, “I know the consequences of what I am doing, but this is what we do for art, because I have a vision.”

Three posters stuck to the wall waved feebly against the sharp winter wind in the very first episode, the words "Listen to the youth" printed on them in loud capital letters. “I saw myself as an observer,” said Ahmadi while talking about her decision to point the camera towards herself, “A silent witness to everything around me. I often felt like a third person—even invisible—because people acted as if I was not there.” Therefore, like Jafar Panahi’s young niece in Taxi, Ahmadi’s voice remains the backdrop through underground raves pulsating even under restrictions on music performances, walks at night on empty streets and loud house parties playing Radiohead. Here, she almost corners her friends to inquire about rhetorical yet somehow extremely real questions of belonging and what is keeping them alive. She is essentially asking, how do they find their place in Tehran when the city itself had stopped listening to its young people long ago?

It is an ideology she shares with her friends who relentlessly pursue their individualities even in the middle of armed conflict, like one of them sporting a cap sewn with the ironic words "Crush Unrest"—possibly discovered in an online store, the headgear had travelled all the way from Jakarta, where the shop’s physical location was. Being a final year filmmaking student, Ahmadi herself had universalised the college-student-invested-in-subculture look of her own—in a bob and nosering paired with dark shades, staring unsmilingly at her reflection in the mirror through the handycam. Before the war, her friends’ houses turned into private, dimly-lit spaces of community and shared intimacy. Here, three friends in little black dresses fiercely hugged each other while singing aloud to the decade-old “Ghasam Mikhoram” by Iranian singer Hengameh, and engaged in visually stark rebellions like lighting their cigarette from the candle which was illuminating their rendezvous—an act Ahmadi liked so much, it made its way into the episode’s thumbnail.

Ahmadi filming them getting ready for a night out carries with it the visual residues of historically oft-photographed moments of young people in messy dressing rooms which becomes their stage for transformation before setting out to party. That historicity is paired with the vibe of the recent get-ready-with-me videos by influencers doused with product sponsors. One of her friends in a black dress with fishnet sleeves raved about the excellence of Huda Beauty, founded by Iraqi-American makeup artist and blogger Huda Kattan, jokingly adding that Ahmadi’s video is not sponsored by the brand. Another friend in a black halter-neck blouse proudly stated she had made her dress herself, almost imitating the moment when an influencer would introduce the designer they would be wearing for the Met Gala. In the background, someone fixed his sleek glasses and glistening biker gloves. This is not a uniform fashion story, but every clothing object that has been historically—and perhaps still is—considered wayward found its way as their means of expression.

This understanding of the significant influence of digitality on their lives also comes through in picture-perfect Instagram breakfasts with perfectly plated French toasts and two kinds of fruits placed adjacent to each other in a kind of youthful romanticism which is also reflected as they sing to the 1989 Iranian pop release “Goriz” by the musician Ebi. Ahmadi has particularly captured these “raw moments” in her attempt towards what she terms a “poetic documentary." She wants us to be equally delighted by the unbridled joy of her friends getting drenched with garden sprinklers, wondering if they could be serial killers trying to escape in high heels, getting a “baptism” after being pranked with water dunked on their head, or doing push-ups in the middle of a birthday party. The narrative of camaraderie is framed alongside Ahmadi’s own practice of filmmaking, where she draws our attention to the artifice of the medium through youthful, cheeky sarcasm that her visual language employs, cutting the camera when a plate breaks and someone yells “Shit!”

We are meant to follow and play along with her friend playing a childhood game of pretend by turning an abandoned kiosk into a make-believe falafel shop or imagining a discarded washbasin as a whistling train and strangely feel the relatable worry of contemporary young adults pushed to think about the calories in their meal. Or smirk along as someone scribbles a sexual illustration in their notebook and rebelliously holds it up before the camera in the very first episode. There is warmth in this whimsicality, and Ahmadi, with her friends, tried to keep it alive even as most of her friends left Tehran after the war. They attempted to keep in touch through calls when the very thing that governed so much of their lives—the internet—was taken away from them. It was a much more vulnerable time in friendships as people craved genuine connection. Yet, as a friend disclosed in the latest episode, it has now switched back to ego-clashes, after the war and conversations with ChatGPT. There were others who left before the war, and Ahmadi had filmed a close friend who had returned for a while from Canada—to whom she asked, where does she belong? “The questions I ask reflect my own struggles,” she said, “I’m just a girl trying to create freely, work and live normally with the people who matter. But I have none of that now, so I feel no belonging.”

Filmmaking for Ahmadi is attempting to hold on to the memories of her friends, as someone who has always feared waking up to their sudden and unexplained absence. “When my closest friend emigrated when I was eighteen-years-old, I began documenting even the simplest moments with those still here,” she said. Adding,

“The dream of a documentary about my daily life and those around me took shape then, though the idea was raw. I captured pictures or sometimes began filming. As more friends emigrated, it became painful—all I had left was some footage and a sea of memories. At 21, I bought a vintage camera, and my obsession grew. I filmed almost daily for a year, building a personal archive of moments with friends—talking, laughing and being themselves in front of my camera. Now, when I miss them, I revisit that footage.” 

It comes back to the matter of survival amidst everything around them, said one of her friends in the fifth episode. Part of a three-member band, they sat around a refrigerator pondering Ahmadi’s question of what is keeping them alive—and music to them was dopamine and distraction, albeit momentary. “We are just trying to live a little better within Tehran’s soil,” said Ahmadi, “Tehran to me is pain, blood, chaos, grief and a flood of memories. Music and dance are my paths to liberation from this hatred and anger. I want to share that feeling with my friends.” Earlier generations had done it before them, as Marjane Satrapi illustrated in Persepolis and Kaveh Basmenji wrote in Tehran Blues: Youth Culture in Iran. Young people kept pace with Western music through smuggled cassettes of Modern Talking, Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd into private parties. As Basmenji notes, “In particular, The Final Cut album with its bitter anti-war lyrics was passed around and intently listened to… Traditional Iranian music was permitted, chiefly serving, with its sad melodies and melancholic lyrics, as a tranquilliser for an escapist generation facing a bleak future.” 

Hip hop and rap have grown to have a large audience as a subculture in Iran, and films like Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows about Persian Cats (2009) captured the struggle for survival of the underground rock scene in the region, which was associated with Satanism—similar to how movements like early Rock ‘n’ Roll were viewed in the West. “I love electronic and punk music,” said Ahmadi, “All artists have had to work underground these years because they have never been given permits to release albums or do public concerts. The government believes these genres lead to chaos and immorality.” In Ahmadi’s film, bodies in hoodies and sometimes facekinis swayed under the dark anonymity of an underground rave without the unwelcoming brightness of strobe lights, where the DJ mixed rap and hip-hop from recent releases by emerging artists yet to burst into the mainstream with tracks like “00CACTUS” by the German electronic musician Kedalos or the Persian hip-hop track “Stress” by Afrukid and Double M as well as the French artist KA̸RL MA̸X’s fast techno track “Hell was Boring.” “Iranian musicians have not stopped creating,” said Ahmadi, “But it is really tough for an artist when they cannot properly make money from their art and have to risk everything just to stay true to their craft.”

The vibe of the techno party is carried over to the car in which Ahmadi shares a ride with her friends in another episode, playing the throbbing Berlin techno of German musicians DBBD and Miss Bashful’s “Confused Bitch” aloud. They are on their way to a rave, and the next moment we switch to the same party car in the morning, where we are confronted with tired and dissociated riders listening to slower Iranian music. The next few seconds are an overstimulating switch between the high energy of the techno of the previous night and the quieter moments of the morning. “Personally, I love post-punk, electro-punk, techno and darkwave,” listed Ahmadi, “But sometimes at the end of the day, only classical Persian music can soothe me—the kind you feel in your bones.” Therefore, some evenings with her friends can also entail the gentler rock of “Hey Jude” or soft strums of the guitar.

In her photo series on the conflicts Iranian youth face today, Kiana Hayeri explores the fragmentation young people are faced with, as they are caught between the rigid state machinery which weaponises religion amidst growing economic crisis and the need to move away from state-controlled narratives. That is exactly what Ahmadi and her friends attempt every time they listen to alternative pop and rap or step into an underground concert, or even turn on the camera to document their life, leaving a visceral trace of rebellion.

To learn more about underground music scenes and music as sites of rebellion, read Upasana Das’ essay on Poulomi desai’s practice and conversations with Shahbano Farid and EXCISE DEPT.

To learn more about different manifestations and representation of youth cultures, read Upasana Das’ essay on Srinivas Kuruganti’s photobook Pictures in My Hand of a Boy I Still Resemble (2024), Nikita Jain’s documentation of Adivasi Resistance in Bastar, Aishwarya Baidar’s reflections on Breaking the Cycle (2024) by Thanakrit Duangmaneeporn and Aekaphong Saransate and Gulmehar Dhillon’s curated album from Bharat Choudhary’s The Silence of “Others” (2010–12).

All images are stills from the YouTube series Tehran Youth Diaries (2025) by Hooria Ahmadi unless otherwise mentioned. Images courtesy of the artist.