Director: Hamideh Moeinfar
Grief turns corrosive in this 73-minute Iranian drama about a mother pushed past her breaking point.
What is Shabe Hamoun about?
Aida gets by on very little, working and scraping together a life on the margins of the city when she becomes a mother for the first time. The joy is short-lived: her newborn falls seriously ill, and without the money to secure proper treatment in time, Aida loses the child. What follows isn't a straightforward mourning story but a portrait of a woman hollowed out by loss and increasingly consumed by resentment toward everyone she believes failed her, from indifferent institutions to people who could have helped and didn't. The film tracks how that grief calcifies into something harder and more dangerous, following Aida as she moves through a world that offered her no safety net in the first place. Shot with a tight focus on its lead performance, the movie stays close to Aida's interior state rather than widening out into subplots, using its short runtime to build pressure steadily rather than spread it thin.
Cast & crew
Nazanin Farahani carries the film as Aida, playing a woman whose grief slowly reshapes her from the inside, with Reza Yazdani in support. Director Hamideh Moeinfar keeps the camera close and patient, letting the lead performance do most of the storytelling work.
Context & significance
Set among Iran's working poor, the film uses one family's medical emergency to look at how financial precarity turns ordinary hardship into something much harder to recover from, a theme that runs through a strand of contemporary Iranian social drama.
Where & how to watch
Shabe Hamoun is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login, presented in Persian with a Farsi-first experience built for Persian-speaking viewers.