One argument in one Tehran apartment, and everything holding a family together starts to give way. Asghar Farhadi's 2011 drama opens with a marriage stalled at a hearing desk, and the question soon stops being who was right.
What is A Separation about?
Simin has done the work: the paperwork filed, the plans made, the life she wants for her daughter Termeh waiting outside Iran. Nader will not leave. His father has Alzheimer's and needs care that cannot simply be handed to someone else. Neither position is unreasonable, which is why neither one bends. Simin moves back to her mother's house; Termeh stays with her father, old enough to understand the separation and young enough to think she can still change it. The household reorganises around the old man, help is brought in from outside, and one ordinary afternoon becomes the centre of a dispute drawing two families of very different means into the same corridors.
The Ktime take
Farhadi's method is patient and close to cruel: every character gets a coherent reason for what they do, and then those reasons collide with no arbiter in sight. There is no villain on offer and no scene asking the audience to take a side, so the pressure keeps building instead of resolving. The camera stays at conversational distance — doorways, stairwells, waiting rooms — and the performances are calibrated to that closeness, where a hesitation outweighs a raised voice. Class, faith, pride and love for a child all bear on the outcome without being announced as themes.
About the cast
Leila Hatami plays Simin and Payman Maadi plays Nader, with Sarina Farhadi as their daughter Termeh. Shahab Hosseini, Sareh Bayat, Babak Karimi, Ali-Asghar Shahbazi and Shirin Yazdanbakhsh complete an ensemble in which no performance is pitched larger than the room it occupies.
Context & significance
Released in 2011 and running a little over two hours, the film sits at the centre of the Iranian realist wave that reached international audiences through domestic drama rather than spectacle. Farhadi writes and directs from ordinary friction: a household decision, a disagreement about duty, a process that treats ethics as a matter of testimony. Contemporary Tehran is filmed without comment, and the work is among the best-known Iranian features of its decade.
Watching A Separation on Ktime
A Separation streams on K-Time with Persian audio and Persian subtitles, so the dialogue's precision survives either way. The catalogue is built for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi interface alongside English, and plays on phones, tablets, smart TVs and the Android TV app. Reading this page costs nothing; playback needs a K-Time account login.