Few Iranian filmmakers are as closely tied to memory and childhood as Kiumars Poorahmad, which makes Kafshhayam Koo? (Where Are My Shoes?) a poignant turn in his filmography: a 2016 drama about a man whose memories are slipping away from him. Over 100 unhurried minutes, the film follows what remains of a life once the names, faces and grievances that defined it start to dissolve.
What is Kafshhayam Koo about?
Habib is a proud, stubborn man whose wife and daughter have drifted out of his life. When the estrangement hardens, something in him begins to give way: appointments are missed, familiar streets turn strange, and small lapses gather into the unmistakable pattern of Alzheimer's. As his condition advances, the people he pushed away are drawn back into his orbit, forced to decide what they owe a man who can no longer remember the arguments that separated them. Poorahmad frames the illness not as a medical case but as a reckoning — a slow un-writing of a family's history that leaves reconciliation racing against forgetting.
About the cast
The ensemble brings together Ali Aghaei, Shaghayegh Farahani and Bahareh Kian Afshar, performers drawn from different generations of Iranian screen acting. Farahani and Kian Afshar are familiar presences in Iranian film and television drama, and their scenes give the family story its emotional ballast, while the direction leaves room for quiet, wordless passages in which the disease itself becomes a character.
Context & significance
Poorahmad holds a beloved place in Iranian culture as a storyteller of memory and family, and his cinema has repeatedly circled themes of memory, loss and belonging. Kafshhayam Koo? extends that preoccupation into old age: instead of reconstructing the past in loving detail, this film watches the past being erased. A 2016 release, it belongs to a strand of mid-2010s Iranian drama that turned toward ageing parents and fractured families — subjects that resonate strongly with viewers living far from home.
Watching Kafshhayam Koo on K-Time
You can stream Kafshhayam Koo? on K-Time in its original Persian audio — watching only takes a K-Time account login. The service is designed for Persian-speaking audiences abroad, with a Farsi interface and a deep shelf of Iranian drama, so Poorahmad's other available work is never far away.