Stories by @sepanta_kazemi

The Eyre Affair

Thursday Next lives in a fractured England shaped by war, politics, and stories. Books affect reality. Criminals target novels to change the world outside them. Acheron Hades steals a device that opens doors into fiction. He enters Jane Eyre and removes Jane. Every copy of the book breaks. Chaos hits the country. Thursday follows him into the novel. Pages shift around her. Rochester senses she comes from another world. She pushes through traps, rescues Jane, and hunts Hades inside the story’s timeline. She kills him, sets the story back on track, and gives Jane and Rochester a true ending. Back home, she exposes Goliath’s failed weapon program and forces peace talks. She stops a wedding, reunites with her former fiancé, and steps into an uncertain future as the only person who moves between reality and fiction.

Signs Preceding the End of the World

Makina is a young woman who moves with quiet precision and sharp instincts. When word reaches her that her brother vanished somewhere in the United States, she steps into the desert with a single mission: cross the border and bring him home. The journey pulls her into a world built on whispers, debts, and shifting loyalties. She slips through cartel safe zones, rides with a coyote who may or may not be trustworthy, and survives a landscape where every shadow hides a threat. The border is not a line. It’s a maze. A test. A place where people vanish without a sound. On the other side, the world feels familiar and foreign at the same time. New streets, new rules, and a language that cuts off pieces of her identity. Makina is forced to navigate neighborhoods where migrants live in the cracks, where authority watches from behind dark glass, and where the wrong move can send someone back across the desert… or worse. But Makina doesn’t break. She observes. She adapts. She pushes forward. As the search draws her deeper into this strange new world, the trail toward her brother becomes more tangled, and Makina must decide how far she is willing to go — and how much of herself she is willing to lose — to bring her family together again. A tense, atmospheric journey through borders seen and unseen. A story about survival, identity, and the quiet strength of someone who refuses to disappear.

The Daughter of Time

Alan Grant, a sharp but restless Scotland Yard inspector, ends up stuck in a hospital bed after an accident. Bored and frustrated, he fixes his attention on a centuries-old portrait of King Richard III. Something in the face bothers him. The official story paints Richard as a monster who murdered two young princes to seize power. Grant starts to doubt that version. From inside his room, he turns the past into a living case. He studies old reports, questions accepted truths, and pulls in help from a quick-thinking young researcher and a pair of nurses who become unexpected allies. As the evidence grows, Grant is drawn deeper into a political puzzle that stretches across five hundred years. The more he learns, the more the lines blur between fact and legend, guilt and propaganda. What begins as a distraction becomes an investigation that challenges the foundations of a national myth. The film follows Grant’s search for the truth as he moves closer to an answer others stopped asking about long ago.

The Houses of Shahr-e Rey

A fallen king of the jinn crosses into the human world and steps into Shahr-e Rey wearing the shape of a man. The city greets him with narrow alleys, old houses, and lives that never stop moving. An old angel narrates his journey for young listeners, turning the story into a drifting, dreamlike tale. Jaloo enters the city with one purpose. He wants to understand humans. Their choices. Their silence. Their hunger for love and their talent for destroying it. Each house he enters shows a different face of humanity. Betrayal. Lies. fear. Greed. Rumors that grow into storms. Kindness that fades under pressure. Cruelty that hides behind ordinary smiles. He watches without speaking. He judges nothing. He only measures the distance between what people say and what they do. The city becomes a living map of human weakness and human desire. And Jaloo keeps moving, searching for meaning in every encounter. His path takes him through quiet homes, crowded streets, and the cold corridors of an institution where the line between truth and madness breaks apart. Every place brings him closer to understanding why humans struggle with themselves more than with any outside enemy. The story builds toward an unseen turn, but the heart of the journey lies in Jaloo’s quiet discovery. A supernatural king trying to read the soul of a city. A world larger, darker, and more fragile than he expected.

Parichehr

After eight years abroad, Farhad returns to Iran and steps into the world he once left behind. Wealth, status, and charm place him at the center of constant attention, yet his heart belongs to a single face. A girl from a forgotten dream. A memory from childhood. Her name is Fargol. Quiet, graceful, and raised in a modest family, she appears again in Farhad’s life like a fragile echo of the past. Their reunion sparks a love that feels destined, yet every step draws them into a web of class differences, family expectations, and a fate far harsher than either imagines. Farhad’s closest friend, Hooman, fights his own battle. A rich young man in love with a girl far outside his social circle. Their parallel struggles reflect a society where love and reality collide, and the cost of choosing the heart grows steep. But the true key to the story lies with an elderly woman named Parichehr. Her life, marked by heartbreak, secrets, and survival, becomes a mirror that reveals what love endures and what it destroys. As her past unfolds, Farhad and Fargol find their own future hanging in the balance. A romantic drama woven with social tensions

I Will Turn Off the Lights

Clarice, an Armenian housewife living in the oil city of Abadan, has spent seventeen years giving everything she has to her husband, her children, and the quiet routines of domestic life. Her days move in a careful rhythm. Familiar. Predictable. Almost invisible. But everything shifts when a new neighbor arrives. Emil, a forty-year-old widower, moves in next door with his young daughter and elderly mother. His presence is gentle yet unsettling. He reads poetry. He listens. He sees her. Something her husband, Artoush, has long forgotten how to do. As the two families grow closer, Clarice finds herself pulled toward a feeling she believed she had left behind long ago. Emil’s kindness becomes a mirror, reflecting the loneliness she has carried in silence. For the first time, she questions the life she built, the sacrifices she made, and the love she never received in return. Caught between duty and desire, Clarice must choose whether to remain the dependable woman everyone expects or to step into a life where her own needs finally matter. A quiet, intimate drama about longing, identity, and the courage to confront the shadows within.

Mrs. Ahoo's Husband

In 1930s Kermanshah, Seyed Miran Sarabi, a respected bakery owner and family man, leads a quiet life with his devoted wife Ahoo and their children. His world collapses when he encounters Homa, a young divorced dancer trapped in the orbit of a ruthless troupe master. What begins as sympathy turns into a dangerous obsession. Miran rescues Homa from her past, brings her into his home, and marries her, tearing apart the family he once cherished. Homa’s presence ignites a brutal domestic war. Ahoo fights to protect her family as Miran sinks deeper into desire, vanity, and the illusions of modernity sweeping Iran under Reza Shah. Homa, desperate for freedom, spirals into loneliness and moral decay. Miran, consumed by passion, loses his wealth, his honor, and nearly his sanity. When poverty strikes, Homa seeks divorce and Miran violently expels Ahoo from her own home. But when Miran plans to flee the city with Homa, Ahoo finally rises. In a moment of raw defiance, she confronts her husband in public and drags him back from ruin. Homa leaves Kermanshah with a stranger, swallowed by the same darkness she once tried to escape. Ahoo returns home with Miran, ready to rebuild what remains. A story of obsession, betrayal, and a woman’s quiet evolution into strength, The Husband of Ahoo Khanom unravels seven years of love and destruction in a world caught between tradition and forced modernity.

The Sorrows of Young Werther

The story follows Werther, a sensitive young artist who leaves behind everything familiar, hoping to escape the weight of his past. In his letters to his friend Wilhelm, he tries to understand his own heart, a heart that pulls him toward joy and despair with equal force. He settles in a quiet village in the spring of 1771, seeking rest, beauty, and a return to himself. But at a local gathering he meets Charlotte. She is kind, graceful, grounded — and already engaged to Albert. In that moment, Werther’s fate is sealed. What begins as admiration becomes an overwhelming love. Charlotte’s gentle presence becomes the center of his inner world. He spends long days speaking with her, walking with her, memorizing every gesture. She cares for him with warmth and honesty, yet always within the boundaries of loyalty to her fiancé. For Werther, this half-light becomes torture. He knows he cannot have her, yet cannot leave her. The conflict consumes him. His letters capture every shift of emotion — tenderness, jealousy, hope, guilt. The villagers around him seem cold, dull, hostile. He feels misunderstood, misplaced, trapped in a world that cannot hold the intensity of his feelings. Even his art dries up. Nature itself becomes an echo of his sorrow. Werther tries to leave the village, to free himself from the longing that is destroying him. But he returns, drawn back by a love that has already defined him. What he finds upon returning only deepens his despair. His guilt grows. His loneliness sharpens. His sense of shame and fear of public judgment haunt him. Werther sees no escape from the impossible triangle he is trapped in — Charlotte, Albert, and himself. To him, love becomes both a sanctuary and a prison, something sacred and yet unbearable. His final act emerges from a soul torn between passion, idealism, and the unbearable truth that the life he longs for will never exist. Werther’s name itself carries two meanings — “island” and “more precious” — perfectly capturing the essence of his character: isolated, idealistic, and set apart from the ordinary world by the sheer intensity of his heart.

Too Loud a Solitude

For thirty-five years, Hanta has lived in a damp underground chamber, alone with a rusty hydraulic press and mountains of discarded paper. By day he crushes banned books, forgotten manuscripts, and the quiet debris of a city that no longer cares for its own wisdom. By night he drinks, reads, thinks, and slips deeper into the strange world that only he seems to notice. Hanta is mocked by his coworkers and belittled by his boss, but none of them know the truth. Among the waves of wastepaper that flow into his basement, he finds rare volumes, sacred texts, forbidden ideas. Instead of destroying them, he hides them. He rescues them. He reads them until their words seep into his bones. He falls in love with the life inside the pages, a private romance built in the shadows. But the world above is changing. A new industrial monster arrives. A massive, efficient, modern press. A machine that crushes faster, cleaner, and without a trace of the human hesitation that still lingers in Hanta’s hands. Its arrival signals the end of small presses like his, the end of slow work, the end of accidental miracles. And with it comes the slow collapse of the only life he has ever known. Hanta watches as his intimate, fragile universe is swallowed by progress. The books he saved, the thoughts he carried, the rhythms of his lonely basement — all of them feel threatened by a future built on speed and indifference. As the world accelerates, Hanta holds tighter to the quiet beauty he discovered in the ruins. His story becomes a poetic struggle against forgetting. A fight to protect the soul of a city that is too busy to hear itself think. A final act of resistance from a man who spent his life crushing books but was shaped and saved by them.

Malakout

Malakout follows a tense night in a quiet provincial town. At eleven o’clock, a strange force enters the body of Mr. Maveddat. His three companions rush him through the dark streets to the only doctor available, a mysterious figure known as Dr. Sohrab Hatam. Inside Hatam’s isolated house, the group enters a world filled with fear and doubt. Hatam speaks with calm confidence and presents himself as a healer, but something in his voice feels off. His patient, Morteza Lachini, stays in another room. He is a man haunted by guilt and pain, waiting for the doctor to remove another piece of his own body. His presence adds a quiet pressure to the night. As the men talk, the truth behind the town, the doctor, and the past of each character starts to rise to the surface. Stories of sin, loss, and punishment connect them. Strange symbols appear in Hatam’s words. Lachini hints at a hidden crime. The unknown man in the group senses a darker pattern forming in the shadows of the house. What begins with a simple possession turns into a journey through fear, faith, and the thin line between healing and destruction. The town sleeps, unaware that a chain of events has started that will change every life inside that house. The night moves toward a breaking point. No one will leave untouched.

The Body of Farhad

In The Body of Farhad, the story is told by a woman who drifts between time, memory, and imagination — a figure once seen only as a painted image on a pen case from The Blind Owl, now stepping out of the artwork to speak for herself. As she moves from canvas to canvas, she becomes different women across history: a noblewoman of the Sasanian era, a shy girl with glasses, a modern model posing under studio lights. Each new form carries the same invisible weight — generations of women separated by centuries yet bound by a shared struggle for freedom, dignity, and a happiness that always seems to slip just out of reach. The narrative unfolds like a stream of consciousness, blending dreams, fragments of the past, and echoes of ancient myths. Through shifting identities and blurred realities, the film explores the unbroken chain of expectations, silence, and sacrifice imposed on women in a deeply traditional world. What emerges is the portrait of a woman who refuses to stay confined — not to a painting, not to a role, not to a destiny written for her. As she breaks through one identity after another, her defiance becomes the voice of countless women before her, carrying the timeless ache of longing and the fierce need to be seen. The Body of Farhad becomes a poetic, haunting meditation on womanhood across the ages — a story where history, dream, and rebellion intertwine in the search for a life that finally belongs to her.

The Life Before Us

Told through the eyes of a sharp, street-smart boy named Momo, the story unfolds inside a run-down apartment building where children with nowhere else to go are raised by Madame Rosa. Once a worker herself, Rosa has spent her later years caring for the kids who were born into lives as difficult as her own. Their mothers pay what they can, then disappear, leaving Rosa to become the only real family the children ever know. Momo has no memory of his parents; Rosa has raised him from the start, even after the small allowance meant for his care stopped coming. To him, she’s more than a guardian — she’s the center of his world, the person he’ll do anything to protect. Around them is a community pushed to the margins: people whose lives orbit around the same rough trade, workers, hustlers, and neighbors who scrape by day after day. Through Momo’s honest, unfiltered voice, we see their struggles without judgment — ordinary people trying to stay human in a place that often forgets them. Everything shifts when Rosa’s health begins to fail. Age and illness slowly pin her to her bed, and the woman who once held everyone together can no longer stand on her own. As her condition worsens, Momo is forced to confront a new reality: the woman who raised him needs a kind of care he is far too young to give. The Life Before Us becomes a tender portrait of love, survival, و the fragile bond between a boy searching for identity and the woman who gave him the only home he’s ever known — a story about dignity found in the most overlooked places.

Ward No. 6

Inside a neglected asylum on the edge of a forgotten town, Ward No. 6 holds five men whose lives have been reduced to a series of routines, outbursts, and distant stares. The room is small, damp, and worn down—yet it becomes the center of a quiet, unsettling story about the thin line between sanity and despair. Among its residents are a silent giant who reacts to nothing, an old man who sings to himself as he darts between windows, and a peasant so unresponsive that even violence fails to move him. But it’s Ivan Dmitrich Gromov, a former court clerk haunted by relentless paranoia, who draws the attention of the asylum’s doctor. Dr. Andrey Yefimich, a reclusive physician lost in his books and abstract philosophies, visits Ward No. 6 out of duty—until his conversations with Ivan become the only moments he truly feels understood. Their exchanges shift from formal checkups to long, restless discussions about fear, suffering, and the meaning of human existence. As the bond deepens, the boundaries between doctor and patient blur. Andrey, who once believed suffering could be reasoned away, finds himself confronting questions he had always avoided. Ivan, a man swallowed by terror and past trauma, challenges every certainty the doctor has relied on. Around them, the asylum’s staff grows wary. When a new physician observes the unusual closeness between the two men, suspicion spreads through the institution. What begins as philosophical dialogue slowly becomes a test of perception—of who defines madness, and what happens when the one who observes begins to resemble the one observed. Ward No. 6 unfolds as an intense, atmospheric drama about isolation, compassion, and the fragile relationship between the mind and the world around it—capturing the moment when curiosity turns into involvement, and involvement becomes something far more dangerous.

A Gentle Creature

In a dim apartment above a small pawn shop, Stepan Nikolayevich Luzin keeps vigil beside the body of his young wife. Through the long night, Stepan’s thoughts trace the story of how their lives became entangled. Years earlier, a quiet sixteen-year-old girl—Elizaveta Mikhailovna Orlova (A Gentle Creature), known simply as Elizaveta—alone, broke, and with nowhere to go, began bringing unwanted items to his shop, hoping to pawn whatever she could. Stepan saw her fragility as something that needed protection, and convinced himself that marrying her was an act of rescue. What he never questioned was whether she wanted the same life he imagined for her. Their home quickly turned into a place of mismatched needs: Stepan, burdened by old wounds and desperate for loyalty he struggled to express; and Elizaveta, hoping to find affection with someone who barely understood how to offer it. With nothing in common—no shared past, no shared desires—silence grows between them, slowly taking the shape of a wall neither can cross. As Stepan recalls their time together, the film unfolds inside his restless mind, shifting between memory and confession. What emerges is the portrait of a relationship built on loneliness, fear, and the things left unsaid—two people reaching for comfort in completely different ways, destined to miss each other at every turn. A Gentle Creature becomes a tense, intimate study of a bond that was fragile from the very beginning, told by the only person left to speak.

Poor Folk

In a cramped St. Petersburg neighborhood, two distant relatives—Varvara Dobroselova and Makar Devushkin—live across from each other in rundown apartments where thin walls carry every sound of struggle. Both hover at the edge of poverty, but the letters they exchange become the one steady thread holding their lives together. Varvara carries the weight of a turbulent past: a harsh childhood, an abusive home, and a brief, tender attachment that ended in loss. Makar works long hours as a low-level copyist, constantly belittled at the office and painfully aware of his place in the world. Despite his hardships, he sends her gifts he can barely afford, hoping to offer her a small comfort. Through their correspondence, they share stories, fears, and the small victories that keep them going. Books pass between them, ideas spark, and a quiet bond forms—fragile, hopeful, and never spoken aloud. As pressures mount around them—money troubles, intrusive landlords, old memories, and new opportunities—the two must face a question they’ve both avoided: whether their connection can survive the hard pull of circumstances that never seem to ease. Poor Folk unfolds as an intimate portrait of two lonely souls reaching toward each other in a city that rarely makes room for tenderness, letting their letters become the only place where they can breathe.

White Nights

In the quiet glow of St. Petersburg’s summer nights, a lonely young man drifts through the city with no one but his thoughts for company. His routine breaks when he comes across a distressed young woman standing alone on a bridge. He steps in to help, and that brief moment pulls them into a fragile connection neither expected. Night after night, the two meet again. In those long walks through the sleepless city, they open up to each other—she about a love marked by uncertainty, and he about a life spent more in imagination than in the world around him. As their conversations deepen, a bond forms between them, delicate and full of possibility. Yet beneath the calm surface of the bright nights, both carry hopes and fears that could reshape everything the moment dawn arrives. White Nights is a quiet, intimate portrait of two wandering souls who find each other just when they need it most—without knowing where their shared nights may lead.

The Patient Stone

Set in the early 1900s, The Patient Stone follows Ahmad Agha, a solitary young teacher in Shiraz who becomes tangled in the misery surrounding the rundown house where he lives. What starts as concern for a missing neighbor draws him into a darker truth about the city and the people trapped inside it. The house holds several residents fighting their own battles: Gohar, a mother struggling to survive after being cast out of her wealthy husband’s home; Belghis, stuck in a hollow marriage with an addict and aching for affection; and Jahan-Soltan, an abandoned old servant whose body and mind are failing. When Gohar vanishes, Ahmad begins searching for her, driven partly by guilt, partly by memories of his own broken childhood. His search leads him to a respected merchant known as Seif-ol-Qalam, whose reputation masks a hidden pattern of disappearances. Behind the walls of his home, women who sought shelter never reappear. As Ahmad digs deeper, the city’s bitter underbelly reveals itself—poverty, cruelty, corruption, and the quiet violence people learn to accept. The stories of the house collide, and Ahmad becomes the reluctant witness to lives crushed by desperation. The truth surfaces when Seif-ol-Qalam is arrested: eight women and two men murdered and buried beneath his home, including Gohar. And just as the dust settles, tragedy strikes once more—Gohar’s young son, Kakol-Zari, slips into the courtyard pool and drowns. The film draws a bleak, unflinching picture of a society suffocating under its own weight, where every glimmer of hope is swallowed by hardship. Through Ahmad’s eyes, we see a world that offers no rescue—only the harsh duty of telling its story.

The Thibaults

Set in the tense years leading up to World War I, the film follows the Thibault family, whose comfortable life begins to fracture as political unrest spreads across Europe. At the center of it are two brothers pulled in opposite directions. Jacques, the younger son, chafes under his father’s rigid rules. Impulsive and idealistic, he runs away from home and falls in with underground political groups that promise swift, dramatic change. Antoine, the older brother, is a calm, introspective doctor who believes real progress comes slowly and through compassion, not upheaval. While Jacques throws himself into movements that flirt with danger, Antoine buries himself in his work, trying to do good in small, steady ways. The story moves along two intertwined tracks: the rising turmoil reshaping Europe, and the quiet storms within a family trying to hold itself together. As war approaches, the brothers’ opposing visions collide, forcing them to confront the cost of their beliefs—and whether the bond between them can survive a world on the edge.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Ivan Ilyich, a respected high-court judge in Imperial Russia, has built his life on comfort, routine, and social approval. His elegant home, carefully managed marriage, and rising career all seem to confirm that he has achieved the life every man should want. But when a sudden, mysterious pain begins to spread through his body, Ivan’s perfectly constructed world starts to unravel. What begins as an inconvenience slowly becomes a relentless illness—one that no doctor can explain and no medicine can ease. Confined to his bed, Ivan watches the people around him reveal their true selves. His colleagues treat his suffering as an inconvenience. His wife and daughter grow distant behind polite formalities. And the rituals of society, once so reassuring, now feel empty and cruelly indifferent. Only Gerasim, a young servant, shows him genuine kindness—a simple, human compassion Ivan has never truly known. As his illness worsens, Ivan is forced to confront the life he lived: the choices he made, the ambitions he chased, and the love he never allowed himself to give or receive. In the final days of his life, Ivan faces a truth more terrifying than death itself—the possibility that he has not really lived at all. A stark, intimate psychological drama, The Death of Ivan Ilyich explores the fear of dying, the illusion of status, and the discovery of meaning at the edge of life—where one man’s suffering becomes his path toward clarity, forgiveness, and ultimately, peace.

Malevil

In the quiet countryside of southwestern France, a group of friends gather inside the ancient stone vaults of Malevil, a medieval castle turned winery. What begins as an ordinary day is shattered in an instant when a blinding flash tears across the sky—a nuclear strike that wipes out everything beyond the castle’s thick walls. Emerging from the underground chambers, Emmanuel Comte and the survivors face a silent, burned world. Villages have vanished. Fields are dead. The rules of civilization no longer exist. With supplies dwindling and danger closing in, Malevil becomes both their sanctuary and their responsibility. Determined to rebuild some form of human community, Emmanuel leads the group—old friends, farmers, and children—through the brutal realities of survival. But hope is fragile. As scattered survivors arrive, alliances form and fracture. And when a ruthless, self-proclaimed leader rises from a neighboring settlement, Malevil is forced into a confrontation where morality becomes a luxury they can no longer afford. In a world burned clean of order and innocence, the fight for survival becomes a fight for the soul of humanity. Trust is perilous, leadership carries a cost, and rebuilding civilization may demand more sacrifice than anyone imagined. A tense, character-driven post-apocalyptic drama, Malevil explores resilience, community, and the thin line between survival and savagery—where the future of a new world is shaped by the choices of a few.