Director: Karim Lakzadeh
Cast: Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, Jila Daei, Zeynab Ebnrahimi
Jila is a 2015 Iranian short drama directed by Karim Lakzadeh, running approximately twenty minutes. The film centres on two sisters and their childhood companion, weaving a quiet, intimate story about difference, belonging, and the strange remedies people reach for when they feel outside the ordinary.
What is Jila about?
Zahra and Zeynab have grown up knowing they are different — both born without hair, a fact that sets them apart from their peers and shapes their daily experience of the world. When their close friend Jila appears one day with an elderly woman in tow — someone said to possess the knowledge to heal their condition — the sisters meet her arrival with wariness. Yet their resistance fades quickly once a shared game begins, and the three of them slip into a ritual that is at once playful and searching. What the film asks, gently, is whether healing lies in the cure itself or in the act of being seen and accompanied by someone who cares enough to try.
Cast & crew
Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, who leads the cast, is one of contemporary Iranian cinema's most acclaimed performers, known for her fearless, grounded screen presence. She is joined by Jila Daei and Zeynab Ebnrahimi, who together form the film's intimate three-person world. Director Karim Lakzadeh shapes their performances with restraint, trusting the actors to carry the film's emotional weight.
Context & significance
Short films occupy a distinctive and honoured space in Iranian cinema — they have historically served as the proving ground for some of the country's most important voices. Jila sits squarely in that tradition: a chamber piece that uses its compressed running time to explore themes of bodily difference, girlhood solidarity, and the social rituals that grow up around illness and cure. For diaspora viewers who grew up with Iranian short cinema as part of a broader cultural inheritance, the film offers a familiar intimacy — small-scale, human-scaled, unhurried. Its focus on two sisters navigating a world that marks them as other speaks to experiences of visibility and invisibility that resonate well beyond Iran's borders.
Where & how to watch
Jila is available on K-Time with original Persian audio. No VPN is needed and there is no geo-blocking — watch on the web, on your TV, or on your phone. Membership can be cancelled anytime.