Ey Iran (1990) is Nasser Taghvai's small-town satire of authority in its final hour: a gendarmerie sergeant determined to enforce discipline at a provincial post just as the ground beneath the old order begins to shift. Akbar Abdi and Hossein Sarshar headline the ensemble cast.
What is Ey Iran about?
Sergeant Makvandi takes over the gendarmerie station of a sleepy town in the last stretch of the monarchy's rule. He arrives armed with rulebook certainties — inspections, drills, polished boots — and quickly discovers that neither his own men nor the townspeople have much appetite for regulation. Every attempt to straighten out the post collides with local habits, private schemes and the sergeant's own very human weaknesses, and as news from the wider country grows louder by the day, his tidy world of orders and salutes becomes harder and harder to hold together.
About the cast
Akbar Abdi, one of Iranian cinema's most recognizable comic actors, anchors the picture, with Hossein Sarshar — an opera-trained performer who moved into screen acting — beside him. Soraya Hekmat rounds out the principal cast, and a wide bench of character actors gives the town its lived-in texture.
Context & significance
Taghvai came to Ey Iran with one of the strongest track records of his generation, as the maker of Tranquility in the Presence of Others, the beloved television serial Dear Uncle Napoleon and the seafaring drama Captain Khorshid. Shot in 1989 and released in 1990, the comedy borrows its name from a famous patriotic anthem and uses a single provincial outpost, in the period just before the 1979 revolution, as a stage for watching how routines of command behave once history stops cooperating. Running a shade over 100 minutes, it stands among the notable Iranian comedies of its decade and a distinctive entry in Taghvai's filmography.
Watching Ey Iran on Ktime
Ey Iran streams on K-Time, the Persian-focused service built for the Iranian diaspora. This page is free to read; to watch the film, simply log in with your K-Time account. The interface is available fully in Farsi, and classics of this era sit alongside current Iranian releases in one library.