Three decades of a country's turmoil pass in the background of A Sad and Beautiful World, a 2025 Lebanese comedy-drama-romance directed by Cyril Aris about two people who keep finding their way back to each other.
What is A Sad and Beautiful World about?
Nino and Yasmina meet, drift, and reconnect across a span of thirty years, their relationship pulled forward less by certainty than by a stubborn magnetism neither of them can fully explain. The film sets their private history against a Lebanon that keeps testing it — periods of upheaval and hardship pressing in on the two of them at exactly the moments when their lives are already complicated enough. Rather than resolve that tension quickly, the story lets it accumulate: every reunion carries the weight of what came before, and every separation raises the same unanswered question of whether love is enough reason to stay when survival itself is at stake. By the time the film reaches its final stretch, Nino and Yasmina are still weighing the same choice that opened the story — a family and a shared future, or the safer, harder path of walking away. Mounia Akl and Hasan Akil lead the cast, in a co-production spanning Lebanon, the United States, Germany, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
About the cast
Mounia Akl and Hasan Akil play the central pair, with Camille Salameh, Julia Kassar, Tino Karam, Nadyn Chalhoub, Alex Choueiry and Valentina Hachem filling out the ensemble across the film's thirty-year timeline.
Context & significance
A Sad and Beautiful World blends comedy, drama and romance in a single register, a mix common to recent Lebanese cinema that tells intimate love stories without separating them from the country's larger instability. Director Cyril Aris structures the film as a co-production reaching across Lebanon, the United States, Germany, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the kind of multi-territory backing that has become standard for Lebanese features aiming at international festival circuits.
Watching A Sad and Beautiful World on Ktime
A Sad and Beautiful World is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, giving Farsi-speaking audiences the choice of either. Streaming it only requires signing in with a free K-Time account — the page itself is open to browse without logging in, and there is no charge or trial to navigate before watching, just a Farsi-first interface built for viewers across the Iranian diaspora.