Director: Adel Tabrizi
Cast: Mohammad Javad Jafarpour Roya Afshar
Avale Paeez (First of Autumn) is a 2023 Iranian drama short film directed by Adel Tabrizi, exploring the tender and complicated bond between a mother and her child on the threshold of adulthood — a quiet, intimate portrait of love and the inevitable passage of time.
What is Avale Paeez about?
As the first day of autumn arrives, a mother finds herself quietly reckoning with a milestone she has spent years dreading: her child is nearly eighteen. The film unfolds across a single day, capturing small gestures, unspoken words, and the weight of everything left unsaid between a parent and a child who is no longer quite a child. Tabrizi builds the drama through restraint, letting the ordinary rhythms of their shared home carry the emotional freight. What the film asks — gently, without melodrama — is how a mother lets go while still holding on, and whether the love between parent and child changes in kind when dependence shifts into something more like partnership.
Cast & crew
Mohammad Javad Jafarpour and Roya Afshar anchor this short in quiet, understated performances that rely on physical presence and timing rather than dialogue-driven emotion. Director Adel Tabrizi, working within a compact fourteen-minute frame, draws naturalistic work from both actors, allowing long silences to speak where words might have crowded the feeling.
Context & significance
Short films have a rich tradition in Iranian cinema — the medium has long served as a training ground for directors and a space where personal, small-scale stories receive serious artistic treatment. Avale Paeez fits squarely in this tradition: a domestic drama with no villains, no crisis in the conventional sense, only the quiet grief of time moving forward. For diaspora viewers, the mother-child relationship at its center will resonate regardless of geography. The film captures a universal Iranian emotional register — the weight of unspoken expectation, the love expressed through presence rather than declaration — in a way that feels both specific and deeply familiar.
Where & how to watch
Avale Paeez is available to stream on K-Time with original Persian audio. Watch on the web, your TV, or your phone — no extra download or VPN needed, no geo-blocking. Subscribe and cancel anytime.