Nasi walks out of prison with nothing but the films he has watched and the lines he has learned by heart, and Cinema Nimkat turns that memory into a livelihood performed on a wooden bench.
What is Cinema Nimkat about?
After his release, Nasi spends months in front of whatever screens he can reach, absorbing whole films until he can recite them from beginning to end. The private obsession becomes a trade: he takes the films on the road and performs them alone, seated on a bench, playing every part himself for whoever gathers to listen. Remote villages and coffee houses become his auditorium. In time the one-man show grows into a small travelling troupe called Cinema Bench, staging the history of cinema for people who have no other way to see it, in the stretch of years when home video was forbidden.
The Ktime take
The premise could have been played purely for laughs, and Mohammad Rahmanian lets it be funny, but the comedy keeps circling back to something harder. A man reciting other people's stories because he has been locked away from his own is an idea with real weight, and the film trusts its performers to carry it rather than underlining it. K-Time's view is that the picture is at its best when the troupe is mid-performance and the villagers are watching, and that its looser stretches earn their place by leading there.
About the cast
Ali Omrani, Mahtab Nasirpour, Ashkan Khatibi and Houman Barghnavard head an ensemble that also includes Asghar Piran, Ramin Pouriman, Hossein Erfani and Reza Naji. The travelling act asks a great deal of all of them, since it requires the performers to act out other films inside this one.
Context & significance
Mohammad Rahmanian is far better known in Iran as a playwright and stage director, and Cinema Nimkat carries that background openly: a bare platform, a few props, and actors switching roles in front of an audience. The bench itself does most of the staging work. Running just under two hours, the 2016 release belongs to a small Iranian tradition of films about the love of moviegoing.
Watching Cinema Nimkat on Ktime
Cinema Nimkat streams on K-Time, where the catalogue is built for Persian-speaking viewers abroad and the interface works in Farsi throughout. This page is free to read without signing in; starting playback needs a K-Time account login.