Director: Saba Kazemi
Maat is a 2016 Iranian doc-fiction drama directed by Saba Kazemi, set against the backdrop of crippling economic sanctions on Iran. The film follows multiple working-class families from provincial cities who pool their life savings in a desperate bid for stability in the capital, only to discover they have all been defrauded by the same real-estate scam.
What is Maat about?
When US and European sanctions squeeze ordinary Iranian households into financial crisis, several families from different towns see one solution: move to Tehran and invest everything in a new apartment. They scrape together their savings and arrive at what they believe is a fresh start. The moment they step inside the flat, however, reality collapses — the same unit has been sold to multiple buyers simultaneously. While the families struggle to work out who has any legal right to stay, they stumble onto a hidden cache of cash, credit cards, and foreign currency left behind in the walls. Suddenly the shared crisis becomes a moral crossroads: hand the discovery to the police, divide it quietly among themselves, or find some other way to make things right — all while each family's desperation pulls in a different direction.
Cast & crew
Maat is directed by Saba Kazemi, an Iranian filmmaker who shaped the film as a hybrid documentary-fiction work, allowing real economic pressures to inform the performances. No lead cast is credited in available records; the ensemble structure distributes the drama across several anonymous family units, reinforcing the film's argument that this crisis belongs to no single household but to an entire generation.
Context & significance
Shot in the mid-2010s when international sanctions had sharply contracted household purchasing power across Iran, Maat gives screen time to an anxiety that rarely surfaces in mainstream Persian cinema: the terror of losing one's life savings to fraud. For diaspora viewers who left Iran precisely to escape economic precarity, the film carries extra resonance — the families on screen are recognizable, their calculation (risk everything for a better address) familiar. The doc-fiction format blurs the line between testimonial and drama, lending the ethical dilemma at the film's centre an uncomfortable authenticity. It sits in a tradition of socially-conscious Iranian realism that prizes moral ambiguity over easy resolution.
Where & how to watch
Maat is available on K-Time with Persian subtitles. You can stream it on the web, on your TV, or on your phone — no VPN needed, no geo-blocking, no extra download. Start and cancel anytime.