A woman's name doubles as a demand for recognition in Man, Soheil Beiraghi's 2016 Iranian drama starring Leila Hatami and Amir Jadidi.
What is Man about?
The film centers on a woman navigating a marriage and a household where her own identity keeps getting overwritten by the roles assigned to her, and the title itself plays on that tension between selfhood and expectation. Leila Hatami plays the central figure with a restraint that lets small domestic moments carry outsized weight, while Amir Jadidi's role sits opposite her as part of the pressure she is pushing against. Behnoosh Bakhtiari, Alireza Ostadi and Ali Mansour fill out a household and social circle that never lets the central conflict feel isolated to one relationship. Beiraghi builds the drama out of accumulation rather than a single confrontation — repeated small frictions in daily life that, taken together, sketch a portrait of a woman insisting on being seen as herself rather than as a wife, a daughter, or a name on someone else's terms.
About the cast
Leila Hatami leads the film with a performance built on restraint, letting quiet scenes do work that a louder approach would flatten. Amir Jadidi, Behnoosh Bakhtiari, Alireza Ostadi and Ali Mansour round out the supporting cast, giving the household around the central character enough weight that the drama reads as social rather than purely personal.
Context & significance
Man belongs to a strand of Iranian domestic drama from the mid-2010s that used marriage and family life as the arena for questions about a woman's standing and voice within it — territory Beiraghi returned to across his other work of the period. At 97 minutes, the film stays tightly focused on its central household rather than widening into subplots, which keeps the pressure on Hatami's performance and on the everyday scenes that carry the story's argument.
Watching Man on Ktime
Man is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login — the page itself is free to browse, and watching only requires signing in, with a paid subscription covering access and no trial period to keep track of. K-Time is built for Persian-speaking audiences in the diaspora, with a Farsi interface alongside the English one so viewers can watch in the language they're most comfortable navigating.