Director: Kazik Radwanski
An old friendship reignites at the worst possible moment in Matt and Mara, Kazik Radwanski's 2024 drama about the pull of unfinished feelings.
What is Matt And Mara about?
Mara teaches creative writing at a university and is quietly working through friction in her marriage to an experimental musician when Matt, a free-spirited author she used to know, turns up on campus. Their shared history and overlapping tastes draw them back together fast, filling a space that Mara's marriage has left empty. When her husband backs out of driving her to an out-of-town conference, Matt offers to take her instead, and the road trip becomes the pressure point where everything the two of them have avoided saying finally has nowhere left to hide. Radwanski shoots the film in close, handheld takes that stay tight on faces and small gestures, letting the tension between Matt and Mara build through hesitation and half-finished sentences rather than declarations.
Cast & crew
Deragh Campbell plays Mara with a restraint that makes her private conflict legible in small shifts of expression, while Matt Johnson brings an easy charm to Matt that never fully hides his own uncertainty. The supporting cast, including Mounir al Shami and Emma Healey, fills out the university and family world Mara is quietly pulling away from.
Context & significance
Matt and Mara premiered in 2024 as a Canadian production and extended director Kazik Radwanski's interest in intimate, character-driven stories shot with a loose, observational style. The film's Toronto setting and academic backdrop ground its love-triangle-adjacent tension in ordinary routines: classes, errands, a long drive, rather than heightened melodrama, which is part of what critics highlighted about its approach to a familiar premise.
Where & how to watch
Matt and Mara is available on K-Time with a free account login, offered with Persian subtitles and dub and a Farsi interface built for Persian-speaking audiences. The page itself can be read without signing in.