A midnight dream sets a deadly clock ticking in Khab Zadeh Ha, Fereydoun Jeyrani's 2013 comedy-drama about guilt, stubborn pride, and an apology that money cannot buy. Saber Abar, Akbar Abdi, and Farhad Aslani lead the cast of this 90-minute Iranian feature.
What is Khab Zadeh Ha about?
A wealthy old man wakes shaken from a dream in which his late mother delivers an ultimatum: within twenty-four hours he must win forgiveness from a woman he once wronged, or his life will end. Finding her turns out to be the easy part. Persuading her to accept his apology proves far harder than any deal he has ever closed, and as the hours drain away his search pulls him through encounters that swing between the absurd and the quietly painful, forcing him to face how he has treated the people around him for a lifetime.
About the cast
Saber Abar, one of the more versatile Iranian actors of his generation, shares the screen with two veterans: Akbar Abdi, a comic institution of Iranian cinema since the 1980s, and Farhad Aslani, known for moving easily between menace and warmth. Behind the camera stands Fereydoun Jeyrani, a former film journalist who made his name with dark urban melodramas before working in lighter registers such as this one.
Context & significance
Khab Zadeh Ha belongs to a familiar strand of Persian popular storytelling in which the dead step into the affairs of the living to settle unfinished moral accounts. Attaching a hard deadline to an act of contrition lets Jeyrani mix broad comic set pieces with a fable about restitution, a blend with deep roots in Iranian commercial film. Released in 2013 alongside a crowded slate of domestic comedies, the picture circulated mainly with audiences inside Iran and among Persian-speaking viewers abroad, which makes its availability with original audio the main way most of the diaspora encounters it today.
Watching Khab Zadeh Ha on Ktime
Khab Zadeh Ha streams on K-Time with its original Persian audio. This page is free to read for anyone, but pressing play requires signing in with a K-Time account, after which the film is ready inside an interface designed in Farsi for Iranian viewers living outside Iran.