Isabel Hagen directs and stars in On a String, a short, wry 2026 American comedy-drama about a classically trained violist who has the credentials for a concert career and the life of someone still sleeping in her childhood bedroom.
What is On a String about?
She studied at Juilliard, which is supposed to be the hard part. Yet the violist at the centre of On a String is still living with her parents in the middle of New York City, and the career the diploma promised has not materialised. What she has instead is a circle of musician friends and a string of private gigs, performing in the living rooms of strangers who hired a quartet for an evening and will forget it by morning. The film follows her through that odd in-between stretch of adult life, where talent is real, money is thin, and every apartment she plays in belongs to somebody else.
About the cast
Isabel Hagen takes the lead role as well as the director's chair, and the cast around her includes Dylan Baker, Ling Ling Huang, Frederick Weller, Eric Bogosian, Jamie Lee, John Kroner and Charlie Ray.
Context & significance
Music comedies usually pick the glamorous instrument. On a String picks the viola, the member of the string family that sits between violin and cello and rarely gets the solo, which tells you something about where the film sits: with the working musician rather than the star. Isabel Hagen, who both directs and plays the lead, keeps the scale intimate; the runtime of roughly seventy-eight minutes is closer to a chamber piece than a symphony, and the three genre labels attached to it, drama, comedy and music, are all present in roughly equal measure. The New York setting matters too, because the economics of playing gigs in strangers' homes only make sense in a city where private concerts are a line item on wealthy people's party budgets.
Watching On a String on Ktime
On a String is available on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can take in Hagen's dialogue in Farsi or stick with the original English track and read along. This page is free to browse; to watch the film you need a K-Time account and a login. The Farsi interface runs through the whole experience, from the search bar to the playback controls.