Director: Mojtaba Saeed Zadeh
Cast: Majid Alam Beigi Siroos Hemati Ali Kazemi Homa Khakpash Rahim Mehdikhani Mahmoud Nazaralian Fathollah Taheri
Yek Shahr Tanhaiy is a 2023 Iranian drama film directed by Mojtaba Saeed Zadeh, set across the city of Ardabil and the remote Alamut highlands of Qazvin province. At 68 minutes, it is an intimate, unhurried story about devotion, displacement, and the silent damage caused when love is built on an incomplete picture of who someone really is.
What is Yek Shahr Tanhaiy about?
Ayoub completes his compulsory military posting as a soldier-teacher and returns to Ardabil, the northwestern city where he was raised. Back home, he plans to resume the life he left behind — including his wife and children. What Ayoub does not anticipate is that Suri, a woman who has built her emotional world entirely around him, has made an extraordinary decision: she leaves the rural Alamut village of Qazvin and travels alone to Ardabil, a city where she has no ties, driven only by the hope of being near the man she loves. She arrives not knowing the full truth of his life. The film unfolds around the quiet collision of these two trajectories — what happens when one person's certainty meets another's hidden reality, and what each of them must eventually face.
Cast & crew
The film is directed by Mojtaba Saeed Zadeh and features an ensemble of Iranian actors including Majid Alam Beigi, Siroos Hemati, Ali Kazemi, Homa Khakpash, Rahim Mehdikhani, Mahmoud Nazaralian, and Fathollah Taheri. The cast brings a grounded regional authenticity to the material, drawing on the performance traditions of both Iranian cinema and theatre.
Context & significance
Iranian social drama has a long tradition of using provincial and rural settings — smaller cities, mountain villages, the roads between them — to tell stories that feel universal precisely because they are so specific. Yek Shahr Tanhaiy fits within that tradition. Ardabil, with its distinctive Azerbaijani-Persian cultural identity, is rarely the center of mainstream Iranian film, which gives this production a regional texture that stands apart. Alamut, in Qazvin, carries its own weight in Iranian imagination — historically remote, associated with self-sufficiency and isolation. For diaspora viewers, this combination of geography and emotion hits differently: many left Iran carrying their own unfinished stories, and films that trace what ordinary people do with longing and distance speak directly to that experience. The film earns its emotional impact not through spectacle but through patience.
Where & how to watch
Yek Shahr Tanhaiy is available on K-Time with original Persian audio. Watch on the web, on your TV, or on your phone — no VPN needed, no geo-blocking, no extra download required. Start watching today and cancel anytime.