AllMovie

The title may be a misnomer: the object at the center of this short documentary by the acclaimed Bahman Ghobadi (Turtles Can Fly) is not a tambourine per se but a daf, a Persian musical instrument made out of sheepskin somewhat similar to a tambourine, with the distinction of being played at birth and death ceremonies in Iran. In this film - a companion piece to Ghobadi's War is Over from the same year - Ghobadi travels into an Iranian hamlet not far from the Iraqi border, where patriarch Faegh and his massive family (including three wives and eleven children) make a living crafting dafs, but must contend with a sociocultural restriction which dictates that men can only play the instrument in groups of other men, and women can only play the instrument in groups of other women.