Directed by Pegah Ahangarani and released in 2025, Taraneh is a feature-length documentary built around the actress Taraneh Alidoosti. It follows a performer whose screen career and public visibility in Iran ran alongside one another for two decades.
What is Taraneh about?
Ahangarani assembles interviews, observational footage and archive material to trace Alidoosti's path from a teenage lead in Iranian cinema to a performer whose credits travelled well beyond the region. The director, herself an actress with a long working relationship with her subject, builds the picture around conversation rather than narration. Alidoosti describes how she chose roles, how she handled sustained public attention, and how her working life shifted after the autumn of 2022, when nationwide protests took place in Iran and many public figures were asked to comment. The documentary also covers the weeks she spent in custody at the end of that year, her release on bail in January 2023, and the professional consequences that followed.
About the cast
Taraneh Alidoosti appears throughout as herself, and the film draws on her filmography for context: her debut as a teenager, her repeated collaborations with directors associated with Iranian art cinema in the 2000s and 2010s, and the festivals that carried several of those titles abroad. Ahangarani also appears on camera; she began acting as a child and has directed documentary work alongside that career. Colleagues, crew and family fill in chronology in shorter segments.
Context & significance
Documentary portraits of working actors are uncommon in Iranian cinema, where non-fiction has more often served social reportage or essay films about filmmaking itself. Taraneh sits in the portrait tradition: one subject, a defined stretch of time, and a director with a personal history with the person on screen. The events of 2022 and 2023 are handled as setting rather than argument, with no commentary added by the filmmakers. For viewers outside Iran the picture doubles as a compact survey of twenty years of Persian-language screen work, since Alidoosti's credits overlap with many titles that reached European and North American festivals in that period.
Watching Taraneh on K-Time
Taraneh streams on K-Time, the Persian-language service built for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi interface on web, phone and television. This page is open to read without an account; playback requires signing in to a free K-Time account. The original audio is Persian, and the tracks available for this title are listed on the player screen.