A school essay assignment sets Sharme Goftan in motion: pupils are told to write about what their fathers do for a living, and one teenage girl discovers that her own father, Rahim, will not give her a straight answer. Hossein Babaeian's 2014 drama builds its quiet tension out of that single unanswered question.
What is Sharme Goftan about?
Rahim is an ordinary man raising a teenage daughter in Iran. When her teacher assigns a composition about parents' occupations, the girl comes home with what ought to be the easiest question in the world: what do you actually do, Baba? Rahim deflects, changes the subject, and keeps deflecting, and the film stays close to both father and daughter as the evasion slowly strains the household. Why a man would hide his work from his own child becomes the engine of the story, which circles questions of pride, hardship, and the weight of keeping up appearances in front of one's family.
About the cast
Samira Aghaie and Laila Azizi lead the cast alongside Amir Fallahi Hamedani. The performances stay small and domestic by design: much of the film rests on faces across a dinner table, on a daughter reading her father's hesitation, and on the supporting players who fill out the school and the neighbourhood around this one family.
Context & significance
Sharme Goftan — the title translates roughly as the shame of telling — belongs to a strand of Iranian social drama that finds its subject in everyday embarrassment rather than headline events. Made in 2014, it works ground Iranian cinema has long handled well: the gap between what a family shows the world and what it lives at home, and the way children absorb adult anxieties about work, class, and status. The school assignment is itself a familiar device in Iranian film, where a child's homework often becomes the crack through which adult life gets examined, and Babaeian keeps the scale deliberately modest so that the question, not any spectacle, carries the picture.
Watching Sharme Goftan on K-Time
Sharme Goftan streams on K-Time with its original Persian audio. Reading this page costs nothing, but pressing play requires a K-Time account — once signed in, the film is available on TV, phone, and the web. The service is built for Persian-speaking viewers outside Iran, with a Farsi interface throughout.