A remote island at the edge of Europe becomes an unlikely place of reckoning in Yunan, a 2025 drama directed by Ameer Fakher Eldin.
What is Yunan about?
The film follows an exiled Arab author who travels to a windswept island in the North Sea, intending to end his life there, far from the country he can no longer return to. He checks into a modest hotel run by an elderly woman whose quiet, unassuming care begins to work on him in ways he doesn't expect, stirring something closer to curiosity about staying alive than he arrived with. Georges Khabbaz, Hanna Schygulla, and Tom Wlaschiha lead a small, intimate cast, and the film draws its weight from silence and landscape as much as dialogue, letting the isolation of the setting mirror the author's own internal exile.
About the cast
Georges Khabbaz plays Munir, the exiled author at the center of the story, with Hanna Schygulla as Valeska, the hotel owner whose presence gradually shifts his outlook, and Tom Wlaschiha as her son Karl; Sibel Kekilli, Ali Suliman, and Laura Sophia Landauer complete the small ensemble. The cast is deliberately kept tight, matching a story that plays out mostly among a handful of people in one isolated setting.
Context & significance
Director Ameer Fakher Eldin brings together an international co-production spanning Germany, Canada, Italy, France, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Qatar, and Jordan, reflecting the scattered, cross-border nature of exile that sits at the heart of the story. At 124 minutes, Yunan takes its time, favoring a patient, literary pace over incident. Its subject, an Arab writer displaced far from home, places it alongside a wider body of recent cinema grappling with exile and displacement without turning either into spectacle.
Watching Yunan on Ktime
Yunan streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, giving Farsi-speaking viewers the choice of a fully dubbed watch or the original performances with Farsi text. Access requires nothing more than a free K-Time account login, no subscription card, no trial period. For the Iranian diaspora, a quiet, character-driven drama like this one is easy to find through K-Time's Farsi-first browsing experience.