A quiet storm of a social drama, Zamani Digar (Another Time) arrived in 2016 as the feature debut of writer-director Nahid Hassanzadeh, one of the distinctive female voices working in Iran's independent cinema of that decade. In a lean 82 minutes, the film watches what a close-knit community does when a young woman's private life suddenly becomes everyone's business.
What is Zamani Digar about?
The story turns on a young woman whose life is upended by a crisis she cannot speak about openly. Around her, relatives, neighbours and local officials each react according to their own mix of honour, fear and compassion, and the film patiently traces how those reactions begin to reshape her future. Hassanzadeh keeps the drama anchored in everyday spaces — kitchens, courtyards, corridors — so the pressure builds through glances and silences rather than shouting matches. What emerges is a portrait of a society caught between judgement and mercy, seen through the eyes of someone with the most to lose.
About the cast
Majid Potki, Shaghayegh Kamandi and Yasaman Nosrati head an ensemble deliberately free of star wattage, and that casting choice is part of the film's realist texture: the characters read as neighbours you might actually know rather than familiar screen faces. Much of the performance work happens in restraint — held expressions, unfinished sentences — which suits Hassanzadeh's observational style.
Context & significance
Produced by Farid Malek Madani together with Hassanzadeh herself, Zamani Digar belongs to the wave of small-scale Iranian social dramas that flourished in the mid-2010s, when a generation of first-time directors — many of them women — turned the camera toward subjects mainstream cinema preferred to avoid. The film met a solid, unshowy reception and is classified under drama and family, a pairing that fits its focus on how household loyalties bend under public scrutiny. For viewers tracking the rise of women behind the camera in Iranian cinema, Hassanzadeh's debut is a natural reference point.
Watching Zamani Digar on K-Time
Zamani Digar streams on K-Time in its original Persian audio. This page is free to read; to press play you just need to log in with a K-Time account. K-Time is built for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi-friendly interface and a catalogue centred on Iranian film and television, so the movie sits alongside plenty of related titles.