Long before he pulled on shirts for six of Europe's biggest clubs, a boy from a rough Swedish suburb was already being written off. I Am Zlatan, a 2021 coming-of-age drama directed by Jens Sjögren, follows that boy rather than the star he became.
What is I Am Zlatan about?
Dominic Andersson Bajraktati plays the young Zlatan Ibrahimovic, born to Balkan immigrant parents in a Swedish suburb where expectations for a kid like him ran low from the start. Football becomes his outlet in an environment that offers few others, and the film tracks how his instinct for the game and his refusal to fold under pressure or dismissal push him past nearly every expectation set for him. Around him, Granit Rushiti, Cedomir Glisovic, Merima Dizdarevic, Linda Haziri, Selma Mesanovic, Didrick Gillstedt and David S. Lindgren fill out the family, friends and rivals of a childhood the film treats as the real engine behind a career that eventually carried him to Ajax Amsterdam, Juventus, Inter, Milan, Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester United.
About the cast
Dominic Andersson Bajraktati carries the film as the young Zlatan, with Granit Rushiti, Cedomir Glisovic, Merima Dizdarevic, Linda Haziri, Selma Mesanovic, Didrick Gillstedt and David S. Lindgren rounding out the ensemble of family, friends and rivals around him.
Context & significance
The film is a co-production between Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, and two of those countries carry direct weight in the story: Sweden as the setting of Zlatan's childhood, and the Netherlands as home to Ajax Amsterdam, the first of the major European clubs his path would eventually lead him to. Rather than chase every stop on that later career, the film narrows its focus to the years before any club came calling, when nothing about the outcome was guaranteed.
Watching I Am Zlatan on Ktime
I Am Zlatan is available on K-Time with a free account login, and browsing the page itself costs nothing. Persian dub and Persian subtitles are both included, and the app's Farsi interface makes a Swedish coming-of-age drama easy to settle into for K-Time's Persian-speaking viewers from the first scene.