Seven women, seven chapters, seventy-five minutes. Haft O Nim — the title translates as "Seven and a Half" — is Navid Mahmoudi's 2019 drama, an Iran–Afghanistan co-production that threads a set of compact stories about women into one lean, purposeful feature.
What is Haft O Nim about?
Rather than following a single protagonist, the film hands the screen to seven different women in turn, each carrying a private struggle of her own. One chapter at a time, it observes the pressures that shape their days — decisions made for them by others, loyalties tested inside families, and the small negotiations a woman conducts simply to keep her own life pointed in the direction she chose. The stories stand apart yet speak to one another, and the stripped-down staging keeps attention fixed on faces and voices rather than plot machinery. By the time the final chapter closes, the accumulation matters more than any single storyline: a composite portrait assembled from lives that would rarely share a frame.
About the cast
Neda Jebraeili, Hasti Mahdavifar and Anahita Afshar head the ensemble, and the film's chapter structure gives each performer a concentrated stretch of screen time to build a character in minutes. Jebraeili in particular has become a fixture of Iranian independent cinema, drawn to exactly this kind of intimate, actor-driven material.
Context & significance
Director Navid Mahmoudi has built his career on the ground between Iran and Afghanistan, and Haft O Nim continues that cross-border focus as a formal experiment: short, self-contained episodes in place of a conventional three-act plot. Released in 2019 to a solid, unshowy reception, the film runs a tight 75 minutes — closer to a chamber piece than an epic — and belongs to a wave of Persian-language cinema that puts women's everyday realities at the center without raising its voice. Its episodic shape also makes it an easy film to start on an ordinary evening: each story earns its place quickly and none overstays.
Watching Haft O Nim on K-Time
Haft O Nim streams on K-Time once you log in with a free account — reading this page requires nothing at all. Built for Persian speakers outside Iran, K-Time pairs a Farsi interface with a deep catalog of Iranian and Afghan cinema, playable on smart TVs, phones and any modern browser.