In 2015, the Mahoor Institute of Culture and Arts in Tehran released a documentary built around a subject the ethnomusicologist Partow Hooshmandrad had spent years studying: the devotional music of the Ahl-e Haqq, a Kurdish religious community also known as Yarsanis, centered in the Guran region of Iran's Kermanshah province.
Hooshmandrad, who holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology from UC Berkeley and now teaches at California State University, Fresno, produced the film; Eric West directed and edited it with Ehsan Abedi. Its subject is the tanbur, a long necked lute that in Yarsani religious life is not simply an instrument but a vessel treated with reverence, central to gatherings where devotional music carries teaching and remembrance together. The documentary, with English commentary framing Persian language performance, was catalogued by Stanford University's libraries under the subject heading "Ahl-i Haqq, Social life and customs," and has screened at academic venues including Stanford's own Festival of Iranian Arts.
What the film offers is a record of practice as it is carried, musicians and singers documented within the ordinary rhythm of community life rather than staged for an unfamiliar audience. Yarsanism has drawn little documentary attention against larger regional traditions, and a minority's own devotional forms are easy for an outside record to flatten into ethnic color; Hooshmandrad's film, made by a scholar with a sustained relationship to the material, is a rarer case of that not happening.
The tanbur's religious meaning within Yarsanism is treated in scholarship as a subject on its own, larger than any single recording can hold, and no particular song or ceremony is set out in detail here beyond what the film's own cataloguing describes.