Director: Ahmad Bahrami
Cast: Ali Bagheri, Farrokh Nemati, Mahdieh Nassaj
Dashte Khamoosh is a 2022 Iranian drama film directed by Ahmad Bahrami, set inside a remote traditional brick-making factory where multiple families of different ethnicities converge, and where one man's quiet loyalty becomes the fulcrum of an impending crisis.
What is Dashte Khamoosh about?
Deep in an isolated landscape, a generations-old brick factory operates exactly as it always has — by hand, by fire, by the slow rhythms of labour inherited from another era. Dozens of families from varying ethnic backgrounds have built their lives within its walls, depending on the factory for everything. Lotfollah, a forty-year-old man born on the grounds, serves as the intermediary between the workers and the unseen owner. When the boss summons everyone to his office to announce the factory's closure, the community fractures under the weight of uncertainty. For Lotfollah, however, the crisis has a sharper, more personal edge: his overriding concern is the safety of Sarvar, a woman he has loved quietly and from a distance for many years.
Cast & crew
The film is directed by Ahmad Bahrami, who has built a reputation for austere, landscape-driven Iranian cinema. Ali Bagheri leads the cast as Lotfollah, bringing a restrained physicality to a man accustomed to silence. Farrokh Nemati and Mahdieh Nassaj round out the principal ensemble, grounding the human textures of a working community under pressure.
Context & significance
Dashte Khamoosh belongs to a quiet but vital strand of Iranian social cinema that looks beyond city life and middle-class interiors to document communities that rarely appear on screen — seasonal labourers, rural factory workers, multi-ethnic families living at the margins of the formal economy. For diaspora viewers who left Iran decades ago, the film offers a window into a world that persists largely unchanged: communal living, labour solidarity, and the complex webs of obligation and affection that form when people share hard circumstances. The factory itself functions almost like a character — ancient, isolated, indifferent — against which ordinary human feeling is measured. This is patient filmmaking that rewards attention.
Where & how to watch
Dashte Khamoosh is available on K-Time with original Persian audio. Watch on the web, on your TV, or on your phone — no extra download, no VPN, no geo-blocking. Cancel anytime.