Director: Sirus Alvand
Cast: Bijan Emkaniyan, Parviz Pourhosseini, Sogand Rahmani, Gohar Kheirandish, Taiieb Sharafati
Shabe Hadese (Night of the Accident) is a 1988 Iranian drama film directed by Sirus Alvand, following a newlywed man whose split-second decision to flee the scene of a rainy-night traffic collision unravels into a sustained moral nightmare of guilt, blackmail, and marital crisis.
What is Shabe Hadese about?
Amir and his wife Homa are returning from a holiday when he drops her at her sister's home in Rasht and drives on alone toward Tehran. Late at night, on a rain-slicked road, his car strikes a young boy. Convinced the child is dead, fear overtakes him and he speeds away without stopping. Back in Tehran, a stranger named Nader shows up at his door claiming to have found Amir's wallet at the crash site — and makes clear he intends to profit from what he witnessed. Trapped between his conscience and his secret, Amir cannot bring himself to go to the police. He pays, and pays again, but the silence he has bought keeps cracking. When Homa finally discovers the truth, the couple's young marriage is thrown into a reckoning that neither of them anticipated.
Cast & crew
Director Sirus Alvand crafts an intimate thriller built on restrained performances. Bijan Emkaniyan carries the film as Amir, projecting slow-burn anguish with quiet precision. Parviz Pourhosseini brings menace to the blackmailer Nader, while Gohar Kheirandish and Sogand Rahmani ground the story's emotional core as the women whose lives intersect with Amir's unravelling secret.
Context & significance
Released in 1988 during the final year of the Iran-Iraq War, Shabe Hadese belongs to a strand of Iranian social cinema that turned inward — toward domestic guilt, class pressure, and the weight of keeping secrets inside a family unit. The film's premise — a hit-and-run compounded by blackmail — gave Iranian audiences a morality tale wrapped in the genre language of suspense. For diaspora viewers, it recalls an era of Persian filmmaking that was unambiguously story-driven and rooted in everyday Tehran life: recognisable apartments, office jobs, married-couple dynamics. Watching it now is both a time-capsule experience and a reminder that Iranian drama has always known how to turn a single bad decision into a fully human tragedy.
Where & how to watch
Shabe Hadese is available on K-Time with the original Persian audio. No VPN is required and there is no geo-blocking — stream on the web, on your TV, or on your phone. A K-Time subscription lets you cancel anytime.