Director: Bahman Ghobadi

Cast: Ali Ashraf Rezai, Allah-Morad Rashtian, Bahram Zarei, Farzin Sabooni, Golshifteh Farahani

Nimeye Mah (Half Moon) is a 2006 Iranian drama-music film directed by Bahman Ghobadi, following an aging Kurdish master musician and his ten sons on an ambitious cross-border journey to perform one last concert in Iraqi Kurdistan — a road movie rooted in the stubborn love of music against impossible odds.

What is Nimeye Mah about?

Mamo is an elderly Kurdish musician, a living legend in his community, who has spent seven months trying to secure the necessary permits for a final concert across the border in Iraqi Kurdistan. He gathers his ten sons, loads them into a battered old bus, and sets off on what should be a straightforward pilgrimage but quickly becomes an exhausting succession of obstacles. When the group stops at a remote village to collect Hesho, a gifted female vocalist, the stakes shift dramatically — Iranian law forbids women from singing in public, especially alongside men, and her presence transforms the journey into something far more dangerous and emotionally charged. Ghobadi never reveals whether the concert will happen, keeping the weight of that open question alive to the final frame.

Cast & crew

Bahman Ghobadi, the Kurdish-Iranian director behind Turtles Can Fly, brings his characteristic eye for non-professional and semi-professional performers. Golshifteh Farahani and Hediyeh Tehrani appear in notable roles, while Ali Ashraf Rezai leads the ensemble as the resolute Mamo. Bahram Zarei and Hassan Pourshirazi round out a cast drawn from both professional and community backgrounds.

Context & significance

For the Iranian diaspora, Nimeye Mah carries particular resonance beyond its road-movie pleasures. Ghobadi has long been the primary international voice of Kurdish Iranian cinema, and this film captures a cultural wound that many viewers will recognize: the state prohibition on women singing publicly in Iran. That legal reality is not treated as a political lecture but as a lived obstacle that shapes the characters' choices at every turn. The film also maps a post-Saddam Iraqi Kurdistan that was simultaneously grieving and newly open — a landscape many diaspora Iranians watched from a distance with complicated feelings. The Kurdish folk music threaded through the film roots it firmly in a regional tradition that predates borders.

Where & how to watch

Nimeye Mah is available on K-Time with original Persian and Kurdish audio. No VPN is needed and there is no geo-blocking — watch on the web, your TV, or your phone. Subscribe once and cancel anytime.