A ball, a restless child, and a grandfather who cannot defend himself: Pedar Bozorg builds its entire story from one small domestic scene. Co-directed by Kiarash Forooharnia and Arash Kazemzadeh, the 2021 Iranian short compresses an argument about family, cruelty, and empathy into a handful of minutes.
What is Pedar Bozorg about?
Left at home with his disabled grandfather, a bored young boy turns the old man into a target, firing a ball at him again and again with a child's casual thoughtlessness. His mother returns, discovers what has happened, and punishment follows quickly. Yet it is the boy's aunt who changes the temperature of the household; her quieter intervention pushes him to look at his grandfather differently and to ask himself, perhaps for the first time, what the members of a family actually owe one another.
About the cast
The short brings together Neda Aghighi, Asghar Kordbache, and Mahin Sadri, the last of whom is a recognizable figure in Iran's theatre world as both playwright and performer. With so few characters and such a compact running time, each member of the household — grandson, mother, aunt, grandfather — has to be established in a handful of gestures, leaving the actors to sketch an entire family dynamic with very little dialogue.
Context & significance
Short filmmaking has long served as Iranian cinema's training ground and testing lab, from domestic festival circuits to international showcases, and Pedar Bozorg sits squarely inside that tradition: a single location, a single incident, and a moral question left open at the end. Its subject — how children learn empathy, and how elders and the disabled are treated inside the family home — echoes a recurring concern of Iranian drama, where the family unit becomes the stage on which larger social questions play out. Shared directing credit, as here between Forooharnia and Kazemzadeh, is itself a common arrangement in Iran's short-film community.
Watching Pedar Bozorg on Ktime
Pedar Bozorg is available to stream on K-Time in its original Persian. Anyone can read this page, while playback requires signing in with a K-Time account. Because it is a short, it makes an easy first pick for an evening of browsing — K-Time's Farsi interface places Iranian shorts alongside features for viewers across the diaspora.