Director: Fares Fares
One armed, desperate father and one hospital under lockdown: A Day and a Half compresses a family collapse into a single ticking afternoon.
What is A Day And A Half about?
Furious and unraveling after losing custody of his young daughter, a man walks into the medical center where his estranged wife works, takes her hostage, and demands one last chance to see the child before the standoff ends. As police surround the building and negotiators try to talk him down, the film keeps circling back to what actually broke this family apart, revealing pieces of the marriage in fragments rather than a single flashback. Told largely in something close to real time, it turns a hostage siege into an unusually intimate study of a man who loves his daughter and still can't stop making the situation worse.
Cast & crew
Alexej Manvelov carries the film as the unraveling father, playing volatility and tenderness in the same breath, while Alma Pöysti gives the wife a wary steadiness that keeps the hostage scenes from tipping into simple villainy on either side. Director Fares Fares, who also takes a supporting role, keeps the camera close and the pacing tight throughout.
Context & significance
Swedish genre cinema has increasingly used the hostage-thriller format to examine domestic breakdown rather than pure procedure, and A Day and a Half follows that pattern by treating the siege as a symptom of a marriage that failed long before this day, not the story's real subject. The film's tight real-time structure, shot largely within one building, keeps the focus on the family rather than the tactics of the standoff.
Where & how to watch
A Day and a Half is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing, letting Farsi-speaking audiences follow the negotiation scenes without relying on subtitles. Anyone can read this page for free; watching the film itself only requires signing into a K-Time account, and the platform's interface can be set to Farsi throughout.