Director: Mohammad Ali BasheAhangar
Cast: Mojtaba Pirzadeh, Nooshin Masoudian, Houman Barghnavard, Hossein Basheh Ahangar, Parivash Nazarieh
Metropol Cinema is a 2025 Iranian drama-war film directed by Mohammad Ali BasheAhangar, set against the devastating siege of Abadan during the early years of the Iran–Iraq War. The story follows a tenacious group of Abadanis fighting to preserve a beloved movie house that once stood at the heart of their community.
What is Metropol Cinema about?
As Iraqi forces shell the oil-rich port city of Abadan in the early 1980s, a small gathering of residents refuses to abandon the Metropol, a grand cinema now pocked with shrapnel and draped in silence. For each of them the theater holds a different meaning — first dates, childhood matinees, the smell of popcorn before everything changed. Through fragmented memories and urgent present-tense decisions about whether to stay or flee, the film weaves together personal histories with the wider catastrophe unfolding outside. The characters must decide what it means to protect culture when survival itself is uncertain, and whether keeping a projector running can be an act of resistance as genuine as anything fought on the front line.
Cast & crew
Mohammad Ali BasheAhangar directs with a cast drawn from some of Iranian cinema's most recognized faces. Reza Kianian anchors the ensemble with his trademark grounded intensity, while Mojtaba Pirzadeh and Nooshin Masoudian bring emotional range to the younger generation of characters. Hossein Basheh Ahangar, Parivash Nazarieh, Houman Barghnavard, and Farid Ghobadi round out a company whose collective screen experience gives the film its lived-in weight.
Context & significance
Abadan carries enormous symbolic weight in the Iranian collective memory. Once the site of one of the world's largest oil refineries and a cosmopolitan city shaped by decades of industry and migration, it was nearly obliterated during the 1980–1988 war. Films set there inevitably speak to loss, resilience, and the particular grief of a generation that watched an entire way of life collapse within months. For the diaspora — many of whom trace family roots to Khuzestan or who came of age hearing these stories — Metropol Cinema offers something rare: a war narrative centered not on the battlefield but on the civilian texture of culture, memory, and the stubborn human need to tell stories even in the middle of destruction.
Where & how to watch
Metropol Cinema is available on K-Time with original Persian audio. Stream it on your browser, Android TV, or phone — no geo-blocking, no VPN required, cancel anytime.