Director: alireza khataeei
Cast: Maryam Ghasemi, paria khodakarami, hamid sheybani
Crystal Siah is a 2025 Iranian drama film directed by Alireza Khataeei, running 83 minutes. Set against the quiet desperation of a family in crisis, it follows two sisters at a crossroads — one who holds the household together through honest craft, and one whose choices threaten to undo everything.
What is Crystal Siah about?
Maryam and Haniyeh are sisters, seven years apart, who share a home and a crumbling family situation. Maryam, the elder at twenty-seven, pours her days into making pottery — a slow, patient livelihood that keeps the household barely afloat. Her younger sister Haniyeh, twenty, watches the same walls close in but reaches a very different conclusion about the way out. Drawn toward faster money and reckless company, Haniyeh edges toward drug trafficking as a solution to debts the family cannot pay. The two women love each other yet are being pulled apart by fundamentally incompatible visions of survival. Khataeei builds the film quietly, placing the audience inside the cramped domestic space where each small decision carries moral weight.
Cast & crew
The film is led by Maryam Ghasemi in the role of Maryam, bringing a grounded stillness to a character who absorbs strain rather than expresses it. Paria Khodakarami plays the younger sister Haniyeh, and her performance carries the film's restless, combustible energy. Hamid Sheybani rounds out the principal cast. Director Alireza Khataeei wrote and helmed the project, marking a focused character-driven production.
Context & significance
Iranian social dramas about women navigating economic hardship occupy a long and honoured place in Persian cinema, from the quiet realism of Abbas Kiarostami to more recent voices examining working-class Tehran. Crystal Siah sits in that tradition — a story rooted in sisterhood, financial precarity, and the moral compromises that poverty forces onto ordinary people. For Iranian diaspora viewers, the film speaks to tensions that many families have lived: the gulf between a cautious elder sibling and a younger one willing to take dangerous shortcuts. The ceramic workshop as a symbol of patient, dignified labour against a backdrop of desperation is a motif that will resonate immediately with Persian-speaking audiences who carry those textures from their own memories of Iran.
Where & how to watch
Crystal Siah is available on K-Time in original Persian audio. Stream it on the web, on your Android TV or phone, with no geo-blocking and no VPN needed. A K-Time subscription covers the full catalog — cancel anytime.