Four men from Isfahan, one border, and a war that refuses to stay on the news: Chahar Esfahani Dar Baghdad (released 2016) folds broad regional comedy into the upheaval of wartime, following an ordinary family whose small daily battles suddenly have to share space with a much larger one.
What is Chahar Esfahani Dar Baghdad about?
The film centres on a family rooted in Isfahan, already stretched thin by money troubles, household quarrels and the stubborn pride that comes with them. When the war presses into their world, the men of the family find themselves drawn away from home and toward Baghdad, a journey none of them planned and none of them feels ready for. What follows plays out as a string of misadventures on the road: mistaken assumptions, clashing tempers, and the particular comic friction of Isfahani characters negotiating a landscape where nothing works the way it does back home. Underneath the jokes, the story keeps returning to the family itself — what its members owe each other, and how far ordinary people bend before they break.
About the cast
Akbar Abdi headlines, bringing decades of Iranian comedy experience to the ensemble; he is joined by Arzhang Amirfazli, a familiar comedic presence on Iranian screens. Jafar Dehghan, long associated with war-themed Iranian drama, anchors the more serious register, while veteran actress Pourandokht Mahiman rounds out the family at the heart of the story. Mohammadreza Momtaz directs.
Context & significance
Iranian cinema has a distinct tradition of war comedies — films that approach the Iran–Iraq war years not through the front line but through the households and small-town characters caught at its edges. Chahar Esfahani Dar Baghdad sits squarely in that lineage, and adds to it the long-running affection Iranian comedy holds for Isfahani characters, whose accent, thrift and quick tongue have fuelled generations of jokes. At a compact 80 minutes, the film moves quickly between its comic set pieces and its domestic drama, aiming at audiences who grew up with both traditions.
Watching Chahar Esfahani Dar Baghdad on Ktime
Chahar Esfahani Dar Baghdad streams on K-Time in its original Persian. Reading this page is open to everyone; to press play you just need to log in with a K-Time account. K-Time is built for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi-friendly interface that makes finding Iranian comedies like this one straightforward on TV, phone or browser.