Director: Alireza Ghasemi
Cast: Khorshid Cheraghipour, Roya Bakhtiyari, Amir Taghdiri
Lunch Time is a 2017 Iranian short drama film directed by Alireza Ghasemi, running fifteen minutes and carrying an IMDb score of 7.3. Quiet and precise, it follows a teenage girl through a single bureaucratic encounter at a hospital that becomes an unexpectedly heavy rite of passage.
What is Lunch Time about?
A sixteen-year-old arrives alone at a hospital to perform one of the hardest tasks imaginable — identifying her mother who has died. Rather than guiding her through this moment, hospital staff fixate on her age and turn her away from the morgue, citing protocol. The film unfolds almost entirely in corridors and waiting areas, watching the girl navigate institutional indifference with a composure that is both heartbreaking and quietly defiant. Her emotional reality is never dramatised loudly; Ghasemi trusts stillness and the space between words to carry the weight of grief, bureaucracy, and a young person forced to grow up in a single afternoon.
The K-Time take
Ghasemi works with remarkable economy for fifteen minutes, building tension not through conflict but through the gap between what a grieving adolescent needs and what an institution is willing to offer. The central performance by Khorshid Cheraghipour holds the film together — restrained, credible, and genuinely moving without a single moment of theatrical breakdown.
Cast & crew
Director Alireza Ghasemi shapes the film with a documentary-like restraint that suits its subject. Lead Khorshid Cheraghipour anchors every frame with understated precision. Roya Bakhtiyari and Amir Taghdiri appear in supporting roles as the hospital staff whose well-meaning rules create an invisible wall between the girl and her grief.
Context & significance
Iranian short cinema has long used the tight frame of a single situation to examine how institutions — hospitals, schools, government offices — intersect with private human pain. Lunch Time sits firmly in this tradition, echoing the social-realist current that runs through decades of Iranian arthouse work. For diaspora viewers who grew up navigating Iranian bureaucracy, or who have faced the cold logic of systems in moments of personal crisis, the film's central tension will feel immediately recognisable. At fifteen minutes, it demands little time but leaves a lasting impression, a reminder of how much can be said when a filmmaker trusts the audience to feel what is left unspoken.
Where & how to watch
Lunch Time is available on K-Time — no extra download required, no geo-blocking, and no VPN needed. Watch on the web, on your TV, or on your phone. The film is in Persian with original audio. Membership can be cancelled anytime.