A single phone call carries the full weight of Tarikh Gozashte, a fifteen-minute Iranian short film from 2019 directed by Yaser Hamzeh. In barely the length of a coffee break, the film compresses a domestic catastrophe into one trembling voice on the line, then asks the audience to sit with everything that voice implies.
What is Tarikh Gozashte about?
The film opens in the aftermath of an act of violence inside an ordinary home. A man reaches for the phone and, in halting, broken sentences, reports what has happened under his own roof — a confession delivered not to a priest or a family member but to a stranger on an emergency line. From that starting point, Tarikh Gozashte works backwards and inwards rather than forwards: the drama is less about what occurred than about the state of the person describing it, the silences between his words, and the domestic world that has just collapsed around him. As a short, it keeps its frame tight and its cast small, trusting a handful of performers and a claustrophobic setting to do the work a feature would spread across two hours.
About the cast
Yaser Hamzeh directs an ensemble of Iranian screen actors including Payam Ahmadinia, Sahra Asadollahi, Adel Aziznezhad, Peyman Mohseni, Zahra Naeb and Nasrin Ayoubi. With a running time of only fifteen minutes, no performer gets room for a slow build; the cast has to establish an entire household's history in gestures, glances and a few charged exchanges, which is precisely the discipline short-form drama demands.
Context & significance
Short films occupy a special place in Iranian cinema. For decades they have served as the proving ground where new directors sharpen their voice before moving to features, and Iranian shorts regularly travel to international festivals on the strength of exactly the qualities on display here: confined spaces, moral pressure, and stories built around families at breaking point. Tarikh Gozashte — the title translates roughly as 'expired' or 'past its date' — belongs to that lineage of compact, socially observant filmmaking, where a household becomes a stage for questions about guilt, honour and the moment a person crosses a line they cannot uncross.
Watching Tarikh Gozashte on Ktime
Tarikh Gozashte streams on K-Time, the Persian-focused platform serving the Iranian diaspora. This page is open for anyone to read; watching the film itself requires only a K-Time account login. At fifteen minutes it slots easily into any evening, and the platform's Farsi interface makes it simple to pair the short with other Iranian dramas in the catalogue.