What does the owner of a failing airline do once every rescue plan has collapsed? In Kamal Tabrizi's 2019 ensemble comedy Ma Hame Ba Ham Hastim, her last idea is also her strangest — and it fills a single flight with some of the biggest names in Iranian cinema.
What is MaHameBaHamHastim about?
The airline at the centre of the story is out of options: creditors are circling and its owner has exhausted every ordinary route to keep the company breathing. Her new scheme depends on quietly rounding up a group of people who have each, for their own reasons, given up on life, and getting them aboard one aircraft as part of a plan she keeps entirely to herself. Before that plan can unfold as designed, an unexpected incident flips the whole situation on its head, and the passengers — a cross-section of desperate, comic, quarrelsome characters — find themselves handling a crisis none of them signed up for, at altitude and in each other's company.
About the cast
The ensemble is the film's main selling point. Mehran Modiri, arguably the most bankable comedy star Iranian television has produced, shares the screen with Leila Hatami, a dramatic actress recognised far beyond Iran, and Vishka Asayesh, a versatile performer equally at home in comedy and drama. The wider cast reads like a roll call of familiar faces drawn from two generations of Iranian cinema.
Context & significance
Kamal Tabrizi owns one of the most varied filmographies of any working Iranian director, spanning beloved satire, spiritual drama and mainstream comedy. Here he works in a broad ensemble register, using the confined logic of an aircraft cabin and the countdown of a looming bankruptcy to keep a large cast colliding. Released in 2019 with a 96-minute running time, the film landed during a boom period for star-driven Iranian comedies, when producers competed to squeeze as many household names as possible onto a single poster.
Watching MaHameBaHamHastim on K-Time
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