One second-hand mobile phone, bought by the wrong man, powers the entire premise of Telefone Hamrah Raees Jomhor. Ali Atshani's 2013 Iranian comedy-drama gives Akbar Abdi, Amin Ameri, and Ali Dehkordi 83 brisk minutes to wring farce and feeling out of an accidental purchase nobody could have planned.
What is Telefone Hamrah Raees Jomhor about?
The buyer is an elderly laborer, a simple man who has decided the time has finally come to own a cell phone of his own. New handsets cost too much, so he goes hunting through the second-hand market — and walks away, without knowing it, with a used phone that once belonged to the president. From the moment the device is in his pocket, his ordinary life stops being ordinary. Calls, contacts, and assumptions attached to the phone's former owner start colliding with the modest world of a working man, and each ring pushes him deeper into situations far above his station.
About the cast
Akbar Abdi, among the most recognizable comic actors Iranian cinema has produced, leads the cast, joined by Amin Ameri and Ali Dehkordi in the principal supporting roles. Direction comes from Ali Atshani, a filmmaker whose commercial comedies of the 2010s often hinged on ordinary Iranians thrown into extraordinary circumstances — a formula this premise fits precisely.
Context & significance
Iranian popular cinema has long enjoyed comedies of accidental proximity to power, where a humble protagonist stumbles into the orbit of officialdom and the mismatch does the comic work. Telefone Hamrah Raees Jomhor is a 2013 entry in that lineage, using the then-new ubiquity of mobile phones as its engine: a device that carries its previous owner's whole world into a stranger's pocket. The film keeps its focus on the worker's bewilderment rather than on politics itself, and its compact 83-minute running time reflects the fast, gag-forward pacing typical of Iranian mainstream comedy in that period.
Watching Telefone Hamrah Raees Jomhor on Ktime
Telefone Hamrah Raees Jomhor streams on K-Time with original Persian audio. The page you are reading is open to everyone; to actually watch, sign in with a K-Time account and the film plays inside a Farsi interface made for Persian-speaking viewers around the world.