One night, one secret, and a city that offers no easy shelter: Farda follows a young mother who must hide her baby from her visiting parents before morning comes. Ali Asgari's tightly wound 2022 drama compresses a life's worth of pressure into 86 tense minutes.
What is Farda about?
Fereshteh is a young woman living alone with a baby her family knows nothing about. When her parents announce a surprise visit, she has until the next day to find someone — anyone — willing to look after the child for a single night. Her friend Atefeh joins the search, and together the two women crisscross the city after dark, knocking on the doors of friends, acquaintances, and near-strangers. Every request forces a small confession, and every refusal teaches Fereshteh something about who she can actually trust. What begins as a practical errand slowly becomes a portrait of a society's unwritten rules, seen through the eyes of a woman who has broken one of them.
About the cast
Sadaf Asgari is in nearly every frame, carrying the film with quiet, coiled restraint. Ghazal Shojaei brings warmth and nerve to the friendship at the story's heart, while Amirreza Ranjbaran appears in a key supporting part.
Context & significance
Ali Asgari belongs to a generation of Iranian filmmakers whose work has drawn attention well beyond the country's borders, and Farda is among his most focused statements. Unfolding largely after dark in ordinary urban spaces, it works in the tradition of Iranian social realism, where a single practical problem gradually exposes a society's wider codes around family, reputation, and motherhood outside marriage. Its compact 86-minute structure and unshowy performances show the country's independent cinema at its most disciplined.
Watching Farda on K-Time
Farda streams on K-Time with its original Persian audio. This page is free to read; watching takes nothing more than signing in to a K-Time account. Built for the Iranian diaspora, the service pairs its catalog with a Farsi-first interface on TV, phone, and web.