A suspended law licence, a visa file that will not close, and an apartment that grows quieter by the week: Goodbye, Mohammad Rasoulof's 2011 drama, follows one Tehran woman through the paperwork of leaving her own life behind.
What is GOODBYE about?
Noora is a young lawyer in Tehran who can no longer practise: her licence has been suspended, and her husband, a journalist, has taken work far away in the south of the country, keeping out of sight. Pregnant and living mostly alone, she sets a single goal for herself — obtaining a visa that would let her start again abroad. The film tracks her progress in patient, procedural detail: appointments with intermediaries, documents to gather and stamp, medical visits, and phone calls that promise more than they resolve. Each small step forward asks her to give something up, and the question of what remains for her at home tightens around every scene.
About the cast
Noora anchors what is effectively a one-woman film, on screen in nearly every shot. The central performance is built from small, controlled gestures — checking a phone, straightening a room, sitting through another waiting-room silence — while the supporting figures are kept deliberately at the margins of the story.
Context & significance
Rasoulof made Goodbye in 2010, and the film first reached audiences in 2011; even on a first viewing, the discipline and restraint of its construction are hard to miss. Visually it is spare and deliberate: muted blue-grey interiors, fixed camera positions, and long stretches without music. The work sits within a filmography in which Rasoulof examines how ordinary individuals navigate institutions and bureaucracy, and it is frequently cited among the notable Iranian art-house titles of its decade. It runs 114 minutes and is in Persian.
Watching GOODBYE on K-Time
Goodbye streams on K-Time in its original Persian-language version. Reading this page is free; to press play you only need to log in with a K-Time account. The service is built for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi-friendly interface and a catalogue centred on Persian-language cinema, so the film sits alongside the rest of the Iranian art-house selection.