Director: Farnoosh Samadi
Cast: Sahar Dolatshahi, Pejman Jamshidi, Hassan Pourshirazi, Azita Hajian, Amirreza Ranjbaran
Khate Farzi is a 2020 Iranian drama film written and directed by Farnoosh Samadi, running 83 minutes. Set between Tehran and the lush north of Iran, it traces the quiet unraveling that follows one woman's decision to assert a small, ordinary freedom against her husband's will.
What is Khate Farzi about?
Maryam, a Tehran schoolteacher, has made careful plans to travel north for a relative's wedding — a short trip, a simple pleasure. Her husband refuses without explanation, drawing a line she was not expecting. Rather than submit to that boundary, Maryam steps across it. What unfolds is not a dramatic escape but a slow, interior reckoning: the social pressures that close around her, the strained silences between people who once trusted each other, and the cost a woman pays when she chooses her own judgment over domestic expectation. Samadi keeps the story spare and close, letting small gestures and unspoken tensions carry the weight of much larger questions about autonomy and consequence.
Cast & crew
Director Farnoosh Samadi, one of Iranian cinema's quietly assured voices, wrote the screenplay herself. Sahar Dolatshahi anchors the film in a restrained, precisely observed performance. Pejman Jamshidi plays the husband, Hassan Pourshirazi, Azita Hajian, Amirreza Ranjbaran, Sadaf Asgari, and Mohammad Heidari round out a grounded ensemble drawn from across Iranian screen and stage.
Context & significance
Khate Farzi belongs to a thread of contemporary Iranian women's cinema that finds its drama in the domestic and the everyday rather than in spectacle. Films in this register ask their audiences to sit with discomfort, to notice the invisible lines — social, marital, geographic — that govern what a woman may or may not do. For diaspora viewers, this texture carries particular resonance: the northern landscape, the wedding culture, the unspoken marriage dynamics are all intimately familiar, even at a distance of years and thousands of kilometres. Samadi's film does not moralize; it observes, and that restraint is itself a statement.
Where & how to watch
Khate Farzi is available on K-Time in its original Persian audio — no Persian dubbing or subtitles are included in this release. Watch on the web, your TV, or your phone, with no VPN needed, no geo-blocking, and no extra download required. Cancel anytime.