A schoolboy needs heart surgery his family cannot afford, so his classmates form a band. That is the whole engine of Dara O Nadar, Fereydoun Hosseinpour's 1999 drama, a compact 74-minute film in which comedy great Akbar Abdi shares the screen with Ahmad Aghalu and a troupe of determined kids.
What is Dara O Nadar about?
Saeed's doctors are blunt: his heart condition needs an operation, and soon. His family cannot cover it, but his schoolmates refuse to accept that as the end of the story. Banding together under the name Sohrab, and with a quiet ally in Khosro, the school caretaker who happens to be one boy's uncle, they hit on a scheme with real charm — form an orchestra and play at weddings and celebrations until the surgery is paid for. The plan works better than anyone dared hope, right up until the money vanishes into a thief's hands. What the children do next, guided by a scheme cooked up by their friend Hamid, gives the film its final act.
About the cast
Akbar Abdi, among the most beloved comic actors Iranian cinema has produced, headlines the adult cast, and the late Ahmad Aghalu — a distinguished presence on stage and screen through the 1980s and 1990s — appears alongside Mahmoud Basiri and Soroosh Khalili. As is typical of Iranian children's films of the era, the young ensemble carries much of the running time, with the adults orbiting their effort.
Context & significance
Iranian cinema of the 1990s produced a rich vein of child-centred features, and Dara O Nadar sits squarely in that tradition: kids confronting an adult-sized problem with ingenuity, solidarity and music. The title, drawn from the Persian expression for haves and have-nots, signals the film's social conscience — the cost of medical care lands on a family without means, and the community, not an institution, steps in. Fereydoun Hosseinpour keeps the treatment warm rather than bleak, aiming the story at family audiences who came for the humour and stayed for the heart.
Watching Dara O Nadar on Ktime
Dara O Nadar is available to stream on K-Time in Persian. This page is open to everyone; a K-Time account login is all it takes to watch. Built for Iranians abroad, K-Time pairs a Farsi interface with a deep archive of family films from exactly this period.