Shot on stark, artificial sets and told with a structure that keeps doubling back on itself, Tamaroz (2017) is one of the boldest formal experiments in recent Iranian cinema — a drama-thriller from actor-turned-director Abed Abest about an evening visit that spirals out of everyone's control.
What is Tamaroz about?
Restlessness is where it all starts. Three young men with nowhere to be and nothing to do decide to call on an older acquaintance, half out of boredom, half out of a vague hunger for something to happen. Inside his home, the mood curdles: the old man begins to read their presence as a threat, convinced the visit is cover for a robbery, and reaches for a gun while calling the police. From that charged misunderstanding, the film works backwards and sideways through the night, replaying gestures and conversations until the line between what happened and what was performed grows thin. The staging itself — bare rooms, saturated colour, deliberately visible artifice — keeps asking how much of the encounter was real to anyone involved.
About the cast
Abed Abest writes, directs and acts, a triple role that shapes the film's theatrical DNA; he came to cinema from Iran's contemporary stage scene. Iman Basim and Hossein Darabi complete the trio of visitors, and the interplay among the three — jittery, deadpan, quietly menacing — carries most of the film's running time.
Context & significance
Tamaroz, known internationally as Simulation, drew festival attention abroad for how far it pushed against the naturalism that dominates Iranian drama. Instead of lived-in streets and apartments, Abest builds the story inside openly synthetic spaces, closer to a theatre stage or a video installation than a conventional set. The title itself means feigning or pretending in Persian, and that idea runs through every layer of the piece: characters performing versions of themselves, a plot that rehearses its own events, and a style that never lets the viewer forget the camera. At 84 minutes, it is a compact but demanding watch that rewards attention.
Watching Tamaroz on K-Time
Tamaroz streams on K-Time in its original Persian. This page is free to read for everyone; watching the film simply requires signing in with a K-Time account. Built for Persian-speaking audiences around the world, K-Time pairs its catalogue of Iranian independent cinema with a Farsi-first interface across TV, mobile and web.