Khomeini is an hour-long documentary from 2021, made in the United Kingdom and credited to Manoto TV, that assembles a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini out of archival material. It is catalogued under documentary and history rather than dramatised biography.
What is Khomeini about?
The programme follows the life and public career of Ayatollah Khomeini, the figure who led Iran's revolution of 1979, and it does that by leaning on rare footage instead of staged reconstruction. Across a single hour it moves forward through the phases of that public life, up to and through the revolution he led. The construction is that of an archive documentary: recorded images carry the narrative, and narration mostly orders and connects them. A viewer new to the period gets a compressed overview; one who has read about these years gets a chance to sit with the source material itself.
About the cast
A documentary carries no cast in the ordinary sense, so a credit list here means the people who appear in the material. Three names are attached to this entry: Oriana Fallaci, Ayatollah Khomeini and Abolhassan Bani Sadr. All three belong to the public record of the period rather than to a performance, and the hour presents them through recorded footage rather than through actors playing parts.
Context & significance
Manoto TV is credited as the maker and the production is registered to the United Kingdom, which places the work among Persian-language documentary output produced outside Iran for audiences spread across the diaspora. 2021 is the catalogue year carried by this entry. The genre tags describe the approach accurately: the hour is organised around footage rather than around scenes written and performed. The revolution of 1979 remains one of the most examined episodes of the twentieth century, and treatments of it differ in emphasis and in the archives they can reach, so the choice of material is part of what separates one from another. At sixty minutes this one is built for a single sitting.
Watching Khomeini on Ktime
Khomeini streams on K-Time, where playback requires a free K-Time account login; the page you are reading stays open without one. K-Time is built for Persian-speaking viewers living outside Iran, with a Farsi interface and a library of Iranian cinema, series and documentary work alongside live channels.