Director: Fereydoun Jeyrani
Cast: Hediyeh Tehrani, Mohammad Reza Forutan, Kamand Amirsoleimani
Ghermez is a 1998 Iranian drama-thriller directed by Fereydoun Jeyrani, following a widowed nurse whose remarriage to a wealthy, deeply suspicious man draws her into a suffocating web of control and danger in post-revolution Tehran.
What is Ghermez about?
Hasti is a nurse raising her young daughter alone after the death of her first husband. When a prosperous and outwardly respectable man enters her life and proposes marriage, she accepts, hoping for stability and a safer future for her child. Yet life inside his household turns out to be far from what she imagined. Her new husband's jealousy and paranoia cast a shadow over every moment of their shared life. As his behavior grows increasingly erratic and controlling, Hasti finds herself trapped between the need to protect her daughter and the fear of the man she has chosen to trust. The film builds its tension slowly, letting the domestic space become a place of quiet menace.
Cast & crew
Hediyeh Tehrani leads the film as Hasti, bringing her trademark intensity to a role that requires restraint as much as raw emotion. Mohammad Reza Forutan plays the volatile husband with cold precision. Kamand Amirsoleimani appears in support, and the film is helmed by Fereydoun Jeyrani, one of the more distinctive voices in Iranian genre cinema of the 1990s.
Context & significance
Ghermez arrived during a period when Iranian cinema was quietly exploring domestic and psychological terrain that official culture rarely addressed openly. Films about marital power, women's vulnerability inside the home, and the gap between a man's public respectability and private behavior were gaining serious traction with audiences. For diaspora viewers, this film speaks to recognizable social pressures — the weight of expectation, the difficulty of leaving, the loneliness of a woman navigating institutions built against her. It sits alongside a lineage of Iranian psychological dramas that treat the household as a site of quiet violence rather than refuge.
Where & how to watch
Ghermez is available to stream on K-Time. The film plays in original Persian audio with no Persian subtitle track. Watch on the web, on your TV, or on your phone — no VPN needed, no geo-blocking, no extra download required. Subscribe and cancel anytime.