What happens when a war ends but the mind refuses to come home? Sizdah 59, Saman Salur's 2011 drama, sits with that question through the story of a veteran whose inner clock stopped in the Iranian year 1359 — 1980 on the Western calendar, when the Iran-Iraq war began.
What is Sizdah 59 about?
Decades after the front lines fell silent, the man at the centre of Sizdah 59 is still living inside the war. The world around him has moved on — cities rebuilt, comrades buried or scattered, families grown — yet his memories hold him in place, replaying a time everyone else has filed away as history. The film opens from a question its director poses directly: if you lived by the sea and one day stopped hearing the sound of the waves, what would you do? From there it unfolds as a quiet, interior portrait of trauma, loyalty, and the widening distance between those who fought and those who only remember the fighting. Rather than staging battles, Salur keeps his camera on faces, silences, and the small daily rituals of a man out of step with his own era.
About the cast
Parviz Parastui, long associated with Iranian cinema's most memorable war-scarred characters, anchors the film. He is joined by Jamshid Mashayekhi, one of the grand elder statesmen of Iranian acting, and Saber Abar, a leading face of the younger generation — three generations of performers sharing a single story about time.
Context & significance
Director Saman Salur built his name on minimalist, character-driven features, and Sizdah 59 carries that approach into the Iranian film tradition dealing with the 1980-1988 war with Iraq. Where much of that tradition focuses on the battlefield, this 90-minute drama belongs to its quieter wing, examining psychological aftermath rather than combat. The title itself points to the Iranian calendar year 1359, when the fighting began, and the film treats that date as a wound in time its protagonist cannot move past.
Watching Sizdah 59 on K-Time
Sizdah 59 is streaming on K-Time — create a free account and log in to watch, while browsing this page stays open to everyone. Built for Persian speakers abroad, K-Time pairs a Farsi interface with a catalogue that keeps harder-to-find Iranian titles like this one within easy reach on TV, phone, and the web.