Salvador Dalí's later years get a fictionalized close-up through the eyes of a gallery assistant thrown into his orbit of excess and eccentric genius.
What is Daliland about?
New York, 1973: a young gallery assistant is pulled into preparations for a major Salvador Dalí exhibition and finds herself inside the painter's chaotic circle of patrons, hangers-on, and performers. Mary Harron's biographical drama moves between the glamour of Dalí's public spectacle and the quieter, stranger reality behind it, using the assistant's outsider perspective to observe an artist who had become as much a persona as a painter. The film leans into period detail, extravagant parties, and the friction between commerce and art that defined Dalí's later career, without pretending to offer a full biography of the man. Ben Kingsley plays Dalí opposite Barbara Sukowa as his wife Gala, with Christopher Briney as the young assistant navigating a world built on spectacle. A France-UK-US co-production released in 2022, Daliland treats its subject less as a straightforward life story than as a portrait of a very particular moment, when the surrealist icon's fame had outgrown the work that made him famous.
About the cast
Ben Kingsley takes on the outsized figure of Dalí himself, with Barbara Sukowa as Gala providing the film's sharper, more calculating counterpoint. Christopher Briney serves as the audience's entry point as the young gallery assistant, while Rupert Graves, Suki Waterhouse, and Ezra Miller fill out the artist's orbit of collaborators and hangers-on.
Context & significance
Harron, known for biographical and character-driven work, uses Daliland's structure to examine fame at its most theatrical rather than tracing a conventional cradle-to-grave arc. The setting in 1970s New York captures a specific late chapter of Dalí's public life, when exhibitions functioned as much as performance as art shows, and the film's outsider narrator keeps that spectacle at a slight, useful distance.
Watching Daliland on Ktime
Daliland is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, giving Farsi-speaking viewers full access to the dialogue-heavy drama either way. Streaming requires only a free K-Time account and login, and the film sits within a Farsi-language interface built specifically for the diaspora audience alongside the rest of the biography catalogue.