Inside an Iranian juvenile detention centre, a stage slowly takes shape. Khate Barike Ghermez, Farzad Khoshdast's 2019 documentary, follows a group of imprisoned teenagers as acting coaches help them turn the stories they have never told anyone into a play meant to be performed beyond the prison walls.
What is Khate Barike Ghermez about?
The film observes a theatre workshop run inside a young offenders' facility, where instructors invite the boys to build a performance out of their own lives — the homes they came from, the choices and circumstances that led them here, the things they never managed to say out loud. Rehearsals become a space where discipline, distrust, and bravado gradually give way to something more exposed. The project builds toward a single extraordinary day: the group is to leave the prison to perform in front of an outside audience. As that day approaches, word spreads that some of the boys see the outing as their one chance to run, and the camera stays with the group as trust, temptation, and the performance itself all come to a head.
About the cast
Toomaj Danesh Behzadi appears as the central adult presence guiding the workshop, but the film belongs to its young, non-professional participants, whose unguarded faces and voices carry the documentary. Director Farzad Khoshdast has worked repeatedly at the meeting point of theatre and documentary, and that background shapes the film's rehearsal-room patience.
Context & significance
Khate Barike Ghermez — the title translates as 'the thin red line' — sits in a strong Iranian tradition of documentaries about children and teenagers at the margins, filmed with long-term access rather than staged reenactment. Running about ninety minutes, it uses drama therapy as its lens: the play is not a gimmick but the mechanism through which the boys' histories surface. The film screened on the Iranian festival circuit, where its access to a rarely filmed institution drew attention, and it works both as social document and as a record of what rehearsal can pull out of people who have stopped expecting to be heard.
Watching Khate Barike Ghermez on Ktime
Khate Barike Ghermez streams on K-Time in its original Persian. The page you are reading is open to everyone; watching the documentary itself takes a quick K-Time account login. K-Time's Farsi-language interface serves the Iranian diaspora across TV, web, and mobile, and the film sits in its documentary section alongside other Iranian non-fiction work.