Careless Crime (Jenayate bi Deghat) is Shahram Mokri's 2020 crime drama, a puzzle-box built around an unthinkable plan: four ordinary men intend to set a working cinema alight while an audience sits inside. A film that keeps circling back on itself, it folds Iran's cinematic past into an uneasy present.
What is Jenayate bi Deghat about?
Somewhere in present-day Iran, four unremarkable men go about the errands of an ordinary week — buying fuel, scouting a movie theatre, waiting for the right evening. Inside that theatre, audiences are gathering for a screening, and the film on the programme mirrors the story unfolding outside its doors, so the boundary between screen and street begins to blur. Rather than moving in a straight line, the plot circles: scenes repeat with small differences, characters cross into the film-within-the-film, and echoes of another fire — one that happened four decades earlier — keep surfacing, as if past and present were watching each other.
About the cast
Babak Karimi, a familiar face of Iranian art-house cinema through decades of festival-circuit work, anchors the ensemble. Razie Mansori and Abolfazl Kahani fill out a deliberately understated cast: Mokri asks his actors for flat, everyday delivery, so the film's strangeness comes from structure and timing rather than from acting fireworks.
Context & significance
Shahram Mokri is among Iran's most formally adventurous directors, and Careless Crime is that adventurousness at full stretch: looping, non-linear, built out of repetitions and small variations rather than conventional plotting. Its central image — a cinema, an audience, a fire — reaches beyond the fiction toward some of the darker chambers of Iran's collective memory, the weight that cinema itself carries in the country's remembering. Mokri treats that memory not as documentary material but as a haunting: a question about how a country remembers, and unwittingly re-stages, its own traumas. The film runs a patient 139 minutes and rewards viewers who let its repetitions accumulate.
Watching Jenayate bi Deghat on K-Time
Careless Crime streams on K-Time with a free account login; this page itself is open to everyone. K-Time is built for the Iranian diaspora with a Farsi-first interface, a natural home for Mokri's allusive, dialogue-driven storytelling.