Director: Alireza Ghasemi
Cast: Afsaneh Heidari, Amir Taghdiri, Khorshid Cheraghipour, Mohammad Amini, Peyman Naeimi
Vaghte Nahar (Lunchtime) is a 2017 Iranian short film directed by Alireza Ghasemi, running approximately fifteen minutes. The film centers on a teenage girl navigating a bureaucratic wall at a hospital, offering a quiet and precise observation of institutional procedure set against personal grief.
What is Vaghte Nahar about?
A sixteen-year-old girl arrives alone at a hospital to confirm the identity of her deceased mother. The hospital staff, citing her age as the determining factor, refuse to allow her access to the morgue. The film unfolds almost entirely in the corridors and waiting areas of the institution, tracing the girl's repeated attempts to cross a threshold that the adults around her consider off-limits. Ghasemi constructs the narrative from small exchanges, long silences, and the indifferent rhythm of hospital routine, keeping the audience close to the girl's restrained but unmistakable urgency. The short asks what it means to be treated as a minor when the circumstance itself demands something far beyond childhood.
Cast & crew
Director Alireza Ghasemi shapes the film's spare, observational register through precise direction. The cast includes Afsaneh Heidari, Amir Taghdiri, Khorshid Cheraghipour, Mohammad Amini, Peyman Naeimi, Rooya Bakhtiyari, and Siavash Cheraghi Pour, a small ensemble whose performances stay grounded in the mundane rhythms of a hospital setting.
Context & significance
Iranian short cinema has long served as a training ground and an independent artistic form in its own right, with filmmakers using the compressed format to examine everyday social friction without the weight of feature-length exposition. Vaghte Nahar fits within a tradition of Iranian shorts that place a single protagonist — often a child or young person — against an institutional environment, using location and procedure as a lens for broader questions about agency and belonging. For diaspora viewers, this kind of quiet, realist short often carries particular resonance, offering a texture of Iranian daily life — hospital corridors, bureaucratic exchanges, the weight of being young and unaccompanied — that longer commercial productions rarely slow down to observe.
Where & how to watch
Vaghte Nahar is available on K-Time with original Persian audio. Watch directly in your browser, on your TV, or on your phone — no extra download and no geo-blocking. Membership can be cancelled anytime.