Director: Hamid Nematollah
Cast: Younes Ghazali, Mona Ahmadi, Afsaneh Bayegan, Afsane Chehreazad, Erfan Ebrahimi
Vaziat Sefid is a 2011 Iranian drama series directed by Hamid Nematollah, set against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq War's missile strikes on Tehran in the winter of 1987. The series centers on a large, fractured family forced together by wartime danger, charting how shared hardship reshapes the bonds between estranged relatives.
What is Vaziat Sefid about?
In the winter of 1366 (1987), as Iraqi missiles begin falling on Tehran, a sprawling extended family whose members have long been at odds with one another is compelled to seek shelter at the family matriarch's garden home in a village on the outskirts of the capital. The village school has already been converted into a refuge for families displaced from the war front. As the city household settles uneasily alongside the village community — whose warmth and solidarity stand in sharp contrast to the newcomers' tensions — unexpected encounters force each family member to reckon with old grievances. At the center of it all is a teenage boy named Amir, whose coming-of-age story threads through the lives of all the others, linking their separate dramas into a single human portrait of a country at war.
The K-Time take
Nematollah frames the war not through battles but through fractured family dynamics, letting the missile sirens serve as a pressure valve that compresses years of domestic conflict into weeks of forced proximity. The ensemble performances, particularly from Afsaneh Bayegan and Younes Ghazali, carry the emotional weight with quiet precision, and the village setting contrasts civilian warmth against urban alienation in a way that feels authentic to the era.
Cast & crew
The series is directed by Hamid Nematollah, one of Iranian television's recognized drama craftsmen. The ensemble cast includes Younes Ghazali and Abbas Ghazali, Mona Ahmadi, Afsaneh Bayegan, Afsane Chehreazad, Erfan Ebrahimi, Soheila Golestani, and Seyed Javad Hashemi — a deep roster of familiar faces from Iranian stage and screen spanning multiple generations.
Context & significance
For diaspora viewers who lived through or grew up hearing about the Sacred Defense years (1980–1988), Vaziat Sefid occupies a specific and meaningful register: it is a war drama told entirely from within the civilian home front. Rather than battlefield heroics, it maps how ordinary urban families — already divided by the smaller quarrels of everyday life — discovered community and common cause when survival became collective. Iranian series from this period often carry a particular warmth toward the rural and the communal, and Nematollah's work draws on that tradition while centering a young protagonist whose confusion mirrors the audience's own attempt to make sense of an incomprehensible time.
Where & how to watch
Vaziat Sefid is available to stream on K-Time with Persian audio and English subtitles. Watch on your TV, browser, or phone — no VPN required, no geo-blocking, no extra download needed. Start a subscription and cancel anytime.