Avale Paeez (First of Autumn) is a 2023 Iranian drama short film directed by Adel Tabrizi, exploring the tender and complicated bond between a mother and her child on the threshold of adulthood — a quiet, intimate portrait of love and the inevitable passage of time.
What is Avale Paeez about?
As the first day of autumn arrives, a mother finds herself quietly reckoning with a milestone she has spent years dreading: her child is nearly eighteen. The film unfolds across a single day, capturing small gestures, unspoken words, and the weight of everything left unsaid between a parent and a child who is no longer quite a child. Tabrizi builds the drama through restraint, letting the ordinary rhythms of their shared home carry the emotional freight. What the film asks — gently, without melodrama — is how a mother lets go while still holding on, and whether the love between parent and child changes in kind when dependence shifts into something more like partnership.
About the cast
Mohammad Javad Jafarpour and Roya Afshar anchor this short in quiet, understated performances that rely on physical presence and timing rather than dialogue-driven emotion. Director Adel Tabrizi, working within a compact fourteen-minute frame, draws naturalistic work from both actors, allowing long silences to speak where words might have crowded the feeling.
Context & significance
Short films have a rich tradition in Iranian cinema — the medium has long served as a training ground for directors and a space where personal, small-scale stories receive serious artistic treatment. Avale Paeez fits squarely in this tradition: a domestic drama with no villains, no crisis in the conventional sense, only the quiet grief of time moving forward. For diaspora viewers, the mother-child relationship at its center will resonate regardless of geography. The film captures a universal Iranian emotional register — the weight of unspoken expectation, the love expressed through presence rather than declaration — in a way that feels both specific and deeply familiar.
Watching Avale Paeez on Ktime
Avale Paeez is available to stream on K-Time with original Persian audio. Watch on the web, your TV, or your phone — no extra download or VPN needed, no geo-blocking. Subscribe and cancel anytime.