Director: Safi Yazdanian

Cast: Peyman Maadi, Mahnaz Afshar, Shaghayegh Dehghan, Mehrab Ghasemkhani, Pantea Panahiha

Nagahan Derakht is a 2019 Iranian drama-fantasy film directed by Safi Yazdanian, starring Peyman Maadi and Mahnaz Afshar. The film unfolds as a fragmented personal confession, weaving memory and imagination through the sessions of a man recounting his life to a psychiatrist.

What is Nagahan derakht about?

Farhad, a middle-aged man, sits across from a psychiatrist and begins to narrate the chapters of his existence. What starts as a clinical recounting gradually opens into something stranger and more layered — flashes of relationships, loss, and moments that resist easy explanation surface and recede. The film moves between the consulting room and the inner world Farhad describes, blurring the boundary between what happened, what was felt, and what may have been dreamed. Characters from his past appear, including figures played by Mahnaz Afshar, Shaghayegh Dehghan, and Pantea Panahiha, each anchoring a different strand of his remembered life. Yazdanian constructs the narrative non-linearly, allowing the psychiatrist's sessions to serve as a frame through which disparate memories are assembled rather than resolved.

Cast & crew

Director Safi Yazdanian is a prominent figure in contemporary Iranian cinema known for introspective, character-driven work. Peyman Maadi, one of Iran's most internationally recognized actors, leads as Farhad. Mahnaz Afshar, Shaghayegh Dehghan, and Pantea Panahiha each take significant supporting roles. Mehrab Ghasemkhani, Siamak Safari, and Zohreh Abbasi round out the ensemble cast.

Context & significance

Iranian art-house drama has long engaged with the interior life — memory, guilt, the unreliable mind — and Nagahan Derakht sits within that tradition. For diaspora viewers, the film offers a portrait of psychological experience rendered in a distinctly Persian idiom: restrained in its emotional register yet quietly insistent. The fantasy elements are woven into the fabric of ordinary life rather than announced as spectacle, a quality common to a strand of Iranian filmmaking that prizes suggestion over statement. The film runs 100 minutes and was produced in Iran in 2019, placing it among a generation of works that explore personal and existential themes through intimate, chamber-scale storytelling.

Where & how to watch

Nagahan Derakht is available on K-Time with original Persian audio. Watch on your browser, TV, or phone — no VPN required, no geo-blocking, and no extra download needed. Start a subscription and cancel anytime.