A dying Qajar prince shuts himself inside a winter palace and lets the past come for him in Shahzadeh Ehtejab, Bahman Farmanara's 1975 chamber drama, now streaming on K-Time.
What is Shahzadeh Ehtejab about?
The last of his line, Prince Ehtejab carries the hereditary tuberculosis that has already thinned out his family, and he knows how it ends. Morad, once the household steward, still calls at the palace with his wife, and each visit brings word that another relative has gone. One night the prince spots Morad in the lane outside and, realising the old servant has not come for money this time, decides the news must concern himself. What follows is a single long night of recollection. The prince walks back through the splendour his ancestors enjoyed and the brutality that ran alongside it: the cruelty of a grandfather who killed the prince's own mother and brother, and the part the prince himself played in his wife's death. Memory, guilt and inheritance circle one another through the cold rooms of the house.
About the cast
Jamshid Mashayekhi carries the film as the title character, a man whose body and bloodline are both failing him, with Hossein Kasbian as Morad, the former steward who keeps bringing news from outside the walls. Around them Farmanara assembles Fakhri Khorvash, Nouri Kasraei, Valiyollah Shirandami, Firouz Behjat Mohammadi, Parvin Soleymani and Shadi, a company drawn largely from the serious dramatic cinema of the period rather than its commercial wing.
Context & significance
Released in 1975, Shahzadeh Ehtejab belongs to the wave of literary, formally ambitious Iranian films made in the years before the revolution, when directors such as Farmanara were turning away from popular melodrama toward interior, novelistic storytelling. Its subject is the Qajar dynasty seen from the inside and at the end, not as costume pageantry but as a weight pressing on one sick man. At 79 minutes the film is compact, and its structure is built on memory rather than incident: scenes slip between the present-day palace and the household of earlier generations, so the audience pieces together the family's history alongside the prince.
Watching Shahzadeh Ehtejab on Ktime
Shahzadeh Ehtejab streams on K-Time in its original Persian; log in with a free K-Time account to start watching. The page you are reading is open to everyone, and the player and menus are available in a Farsi interface built for Persian-speaking viewers abroad.