AllMovie

A battered old tape recorder sends two bands of kids on a wild goose chase in this family-friendly comedy drama from Iran. Parisa (Parisa Poorghasemi) is a young girl living in a poor neighborhood in Yazd, a city in Iran. Parisa's most prized possession is an old cassette player that has seen better days; while it barely works, it allows her to listen to tapes of her late father, and her mother uses it to play religious recordings during services at a nearby mosque. Parisa wants to get the tape machine fixed before it falls apart, and is looking for Meisam (Meisam Jahankhah), a neighborhood boy with a knack for repairing things, but before she can track him down, the tape recorder is stolen by Mohammad (Seyed Mohammad Hosseini) and Reza (Seyed Reza Hosseini), a pair of orphaned brothers. Mohammad and Reza scrape together a living by collecting junk and selling it using a rickety old pushcart; by selling the cassette machine, they hope to make enough to replace their old cart with a newer one that would help them earn a more dependable living. As first, Parisa searches for the brothers in hopes of getting her tape player back while the boys give chase; later, Mohammad has second thoughts and tries to find Parisa so he can return her property, but he doesn't have much luck. Kochehaye Barik (aka Narrow Alleys) received its North American premiere at the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival.