Director: Amir Sajjad Hosseini
Cast: Alireza Ostadi, Keyvan Saket, Mansour Arabi, Roshanak Gerami
Hia Hova is a 2019 Iranian drama short film directed by Amir Sajjad Hosseini, running approximately thirty minutes. Set within the formal corridors of a family court, the film zeroes in on the quiet collision between religious conviction and the machinery of civil law.
What is Hia Hova about?
A young seminary student and his wife arrive at the family court, apparently seeking resolution to a domestic dispute. As they wait, speak, and navigate the procedural demands placed on them, layers of their relationship and their expectations of justice begin to surface. The film observes their predicament with restraint, letting small gestures and silences carry the emotional weight of their situation. Neither villainizing nor idealizing its central figures, it traces the tension between personal faith, institutional process, and the intimate compromises that couples carry into public spaces where strangers must arbitrate private pain.
Cast & crew
Director Amir Sajjad Hosseini brings a measured, observational hand to this short drama. Alireza Ostadi and Keyvan Saket anchor the court-facing scenes, while Mansour Arabi and Roshanak Gerami round out the ensemble, each contributing to the film's restrained, naturalistic register.
Context & significance
Iranian short films have long served as training grounds for the country's most celebrated filmmakers, and Hia Hova fits squarely in that tradition of intimate social realism. Family court dramas carry particular resonance for Persian-speaking viewers — the gap between religious expectation and civil reality is a tension many in the diaspora recognize from personal experience or family memory. The film belongs to a body of Iranian cinema that treats ordinary institutional encounters as revealing pressure points in modern Iranian life, quiet in style but substantial in what it observes about marriage, duty, and the formal structures humans build to manage their most private struggles.
Where & how to watch
Hia Hova is available on K-Time with original Persian audio. Watch it on the web, on your TV, or on your phone with no VPN and no geo-blocking. A K-Time subscription lets you cancel anytime.