One fare changes everything in Emrooz. Reza Mirkarimi's 2014 drama rides along with a weathered Iranian taxi driver whose last passenger of the day, a young woman in distress, leads him to a small hospital — and to a series of choices he never asked to make.
What is Emrooz about?
The driver at the film's center is a man of few words nearing the end of a shift when a visibly troubled young woman gets into his cab and asks for a hospital. Rather than dropping her at the door and driving off, he stays. The hospital staff draw their own conclusions about who he is to her, and he declines to correct them, absorbing suspicion and judgment in near-total silence. Over 88 minutes, largely inside the hospital's corridors and waiting rooms, the film watches a stranger's quiet decision to remain turn into something weightier, asking how far responsibility for another person can stretch in a single day.
About the cast
Parviz Parastui, among the most celebrated actors of Iranian cinema, carries the film with a deliberately withheld performance — long stretches pass with hardly a word spoken. Soheila Golestani and Shabnam Moghadami complete the small central ensemble, both working in the same restrained register the film asks of everyone on screen.
Context & significance
Mirkarimi has long been known for building moral questions into unassuming everyday settings, and Emrooz — the title simply means Today — is among his most stripped-down works. It is the kind of filmmaking that trusts a viewer to sit inside an uncomfortable silence rather than have its meaning explained away. Its near-real-time structure, confined locations, and reliance on what characters refuse to say connect it to a broader tradition of Iranian minimalist drama, where an ordinary act of decency is examined until it reveals an entire ethics.
Watching Emrooz on K-Time
You can stream Emrooz on K-Time in its original Persian audio. Browsing this page needs no account, though watching does — sign in to K-Time and the film plays on web, mobile, and TV apps alike, inside a fully Farsi interface made for Persian speakers living abroad.