Director: Seyyed Masoud Atyabi
Cast: Pejman Jamshidi, Mohsen Kiaei, Rima Raminfar, Sadaf Espahbodi, Mahla Baqeri
Hotel is a 2023 Iranian drama film directed by Seyyed Masoud Atyabi, running 124 minutes and set inside a storied establishment where financial pressure and human complexity collide. The film weaves together the lives of guests whose private stories quietly mirror the tensions of modern life.
What is Hotel about?
At the center of the story stands an aging hotel — grand in its past, precarious in its present. The building's owners face mounting economic strain that threatens to shutter its doors for good, forcing staff and management to reckon with an uncertain future. Meanwhile, a rotating cast of guests checks in, each carrying burdens and secrets of their own. As their lives briefly intersect within the hotel's walls, personal dramas surface one by one — sometimes tender, sometimes unsettling — painting a mosaic of contemporary Iranian society. The film uses the contained space of the hotel as a lens through which everyday pressures, relationships, and quiet moral choices come into sharp focus.
Cast & crew
The ensemble is anchored by Pejman Jamshidi and Mohsen Kiaei, two well-established presences in Iranian cinema known for grounded, naturalistic performances. Rima Raminfar and Sadaf Espahbodi bring emotional weight to the female roles, while Mahla Baqeri, Gholamreza Nikkhah, Maryam Vahidzadeh, and Farzaneh Ghasemzadeh round out a cast that gives the multi-strand narrative its human texture.
Context & significance
Hotel belongs to a strong tradition of Iranian ensemble drama — films that use a shared physical space to observe how ordinary people navigate economic hardship and social change. For diaspora viewers, that setting resonates: the hotel as a transient refuge reflects familiar feelings of displacement and longing. Atyabi's film arrives in 2023, a period when Iranian cinema continued to produce socially observant work that travels well beyond national borders. The genre-adjacent structure — multiple storylines, brief intersections, no single hero — feels both distinctly Persian in sensibility and universally accessible to anyone who has watched lives unfold in close quarters.
Where & how to watch
Hotel is available on K-Time with original Persian audio and Persian subtitles. Stream it on the web, on your TV, or on your phone — no VPN needed, no geo-blocking, and you can cancel anytime.