Fraud dressed up as philanthropy powers Aks-e Khosoosi, Hossein Bakhshipoor's 2015 Iranian comedy in which a firm claiming to nurture the country's brightest minds turns out to be running a very different business behind the office door.
What is Aks-e Khosoosi about?
On paper, the company at the heart of the film exists to support gifted young talents. In practice, its founders have discovered that noble-sounding paperwork opens wallets faster than any honest pitch, and a swindle grows underneath the charitable branding. The scheme runs smoothly until the police, after a long stretch of quiet investigation, piece together what the outfit is actually selling. As officers close in and prepare to round up the partners, the con men's carefully maintained front begins to wobble, and a chain of mishaps, close calls, and comic reversals keeps shifting the ground under everyone involved. The humour comes less from jokes than from watching schemers improvise while their story falls apart around them.
About the cast
Akbar Abdi, one of the most familiar comic actors in Iranian cinema with a career stretching back to the 1980s, headlines a busy ensemble. Kambiz Dirbaz and Kamran Tafti bring contrasting energies to the scheme's inner circle, while Sara Khoeniha, Ramin Rastad, Omid Jebeli, Safar Kashkooli, and Mohammad Reza Mohebati round out the crowd of partners, marks, and pursuers that gives the film its ensemble rhythm.
Context & significance
The mid-2010s produced a run of Iranian social comedies that used swindles and get-rich-quick schemes to poke at everyday economic anxieties, and Aks-e Khosoosi belongs squarely to that wave. Directed by Hossein Bakhshipoor and released in 2015, it pairs its comedy label with a social one: the laughs sit on top of a recognisable portrait of how easily official-looking institutions can win people's trust. At 86 minutes it moves quickly, favouring escalation over subplots.
Watching Aks-e Khosoosi on Ktime
You can stream Aks-e Khosoosi on K-Time in its original Farsi. This page is free to browse; playback simply asks you to sign in to a K-Time account. K-Time serves Persian-speaking viewers around the world, and its Farsi interface makes it easy to line this film up alongside other Iranian comedies from the same era.