Director: Parviz Sayyad
Cast: Googoosh, Saeed Kangarani, Mahbubeh Bayat, Maliheh Nazari, Jahangir Forouhar
Dar Emtedad Shab is a 1978 Iranian drama-romance film directed by Parviz Sayyad, starring the legendary Googoosh alongside Saeed Kangarani. Set against the glittering world of Persian pop stardom, it traces an unexpected love story that unfolds under the weight of illness, sacrifice, and impossible choices.
What is Dar Emtedad Shab about?
Parvaneh is a celebrated singer and film actress whose public life masks a complicated private world — including a clandestine relationship with a married man. When a university student named Babak crosses her path, something genuine stirs between them. Babak is idealistic and devoted, yet he carries a secret that darkens the horizon of any future they might share: a diagnosis of leukaemia. For a stretch of time they carve out a tender, almost ordinary happiness together. Then Parvaneh discovers what Babak has been hiding. Faced with both her feelings and the reality of his prognosis, she makes a painful decision that will define the rest of the story — resolving to send him abroad for specialist medical treatment, even if that means letting go.
Cast & crew
Googoosh — Iran's most iconic pop voice — carries the emotional centre of the film with the quiet authority she also brought to her music. Saeed Kangarani plays the ailing student Babak with genuine vulnerability. The supporting cast includes Mahbubeh Bayat, Maliheh Nazari, Jahangir Forouhar, Naser Mamdouh, Akbar Doodkar, and Giti Forouhar, all familiar faces of late-Pahlavi-era Iranian cinema.
Context & significance
Released in 1978 — just months before the revolution reshaped Iranian culture beyond recognition — Dar Emtedad Shab stands as a late flowering of the pre-revolution commercial cinema that combined melodrama, Persian pop, and star power into a distinctly Tehran-flavoured genre. Googoosh was at the peak of her cultural reach, and her presence gives the film a documentary quality almost despite itself: watching her here is watching a world on the edge of transformation. For diaspora audiences, this film carries the additional weight of memory — of a Tehran that existed, of music that was allowed to be joyful and public, of an era that ended abruptly. That historical charge is inseparable from the love story at the film's core.
Where & how to watch
Dar Emtedad Shab is available on K-Time in its original Persian audio. Watch on the web, on your TV, or on your phone — no VPN needed, no geo-blocking, no extra download required. Start and cancel anytime.