A small town buried under fresh snow, a row of shutters already pulled down for the evening, and one lit window a child cannot walk past. Alma compresses a whole winter's worth of unease into roughly six minutes.
What is Alma about?
We meet Alma mid-run, scarf trailing, small enough that the drifts come to her knees. She chalks her name onto a wall, scuffs through the powder, and drifts down a street where the shops have mostly closed for the day. Then a display stops her: an antique toy shop whose window is crowded with figures that look as though they have been waiting a long time for company. One of them, a doll near the glass, has a face she recognises. The door gives when she pushes it. What follows unfolds almost without a spoken word, carried by footsteps, glances and the small mechanical sounds of a room whose shelves are far better stocked than the empty street outside would suggest.
The Ktime take
The K-Time take: this one earns its chill through restraint rather than volume. For its opening stretch it is simply a portrait of a child at play, and the animation spends real attention on the weight of wet snow, the drag of a coat sleeve, the way a small body leans against glass to cut the glare. That patience is the entire trick. By the time the interior takes over, we have accepted the world as ordinary, so every departure from ordinary lands harder. The character design is the standout, stylised just far enough to sit on the uncanny line without tipping into caricature, while the sound mix does the work a loud score would otherwise shout. The idea itself is not subtle, and anyone who watches a lot of short horror will see its shape arriving. Execution is what makes the runtime worth spending: precise framing, unhurried pacing, and a closing beat held several seconds past comfort. Recommended for viewers who want a complete fright without giving up an evening; not recommended for small children without a parent watching first.
About the cast
Our records for this release list no credited director or cast, which is common for animated shorts that circulate under a studio or festival banner rather than a headline name. It changes little here: Alma never speaks, so there is no voice performance to weigh. Everything you learn about the girl arrives through animation, staging and sound rather than dialogue.
Context & significance
The film sits in the compact, dialogue-free strain of animated horror that thrived on festival programmes through the 2010s, where one strong image has to carry what a feature spreads across ninety minutes. It earned a solid, unshowy reception, no small thing for a piece of this length, and its four genre tags of animation, fantasy, horror and mystery are all accurate at once, which hints at how it works. The winter setting does deliberate work too, since snow flattens sound, empties the street and leaves a lit window as the only thing worth looking at.
Watching Alma on Ktime
Alma streams on K-Time, and the page you are reading is free to browse; pressing play simply needs a K-Time account login. The interface is built Farsi-first for viewers across the Iranian diaspora, so menus, search and subtitle controls behave the way you would want them to at home. At roughly six minutes it slots easily into an evening, though perhaps not the youngest household member's.