Twenty years after the Bam earthquake, director Amir Abbas Rabiie returns to the disaster's opening hours with Ahmad, a 2024 Iranian drama about a rescue effort that history books barely recorded. Part adventure, part social chronicle, the film races through eighteen desperate hours in southeastern Iran.
What is Ahmad about?
In the last days of December 2003, a violent pre-dawn earthquake flattens the ancient city of Bam, burying entire neighborhoods while most of the country is still asleep. Communication lines are down, roads are cracked, and the scale of the catastrophe is not yet understood in Tehran. Into this chaos steps Ahmad, a seasoned commander who reaches the ruined city among the very first responders. With winter cold closing in and survivors trapped beneath collapsed mud-brick homes, he must improvise a rescue operation from almost nothing: organizing volunteers, clearing routes, and making impossible choices about where to dig first. The film follows those first eighteen hours almost minute by minute, staying close to the ground with the people pulling their neighbors from the rubble.
About the cast
Tinoo Salehi anchors the ensemble, supported by Toumaj Danesh-Behzadi, Sareh Rashidi, Mahyar Shapouri, Abbas Jalilzadeh, Emad Darvishi, Maryam Mahani and Tasnif Hosseini. Sareh Rashidi's performance earned an honorary diploma at the 42nd Fajr Film Festival, and the supporting cast fill out the relief effort around the commander, which keeps the focus on collective effort rather than on a single hero's face.
Context & significance
The Bam earthquake of 26 December 2003 remains one of the deadliest natural disasters in Iran's modern history: tens of thousands of people were killed and the city's landmark citadel, Arg-e Bam, was largely destroyed. Ahmad was produced for the twentieth anniversary of the event and commemorates the real-life commander Ahmad Kazemi, who took part in the early relief effort. Rabiie stages the story as history and social drama rather than as disaster spectacle, reconstructing the confusion of those hours when no one outside the region yet knew how bad things were. At 115 minutes, it sits alongside a wave of recent Iranian films that revisit defining national events through personal stories.
Watching Ahmad on Ktime
Ahmad streams on K-Time with its original Persian audio. Reading this page is free; to press play you only need to sign in with a K-Time account. The service is built for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi-friendly interface that works on TV, phone and browser.