{"id":767538,"date":"2026-09-11T18:38:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T18:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/767538\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T18:38:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T18:38:10","slug":"a-bit-of-light-review-a-mournful-quietly-comic-drama-from-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/767538\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A Bit of Light\u2019 Review: A Mournful, Quietly Comic Drama From Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAs its modest title suggests, A Bit of Light (Kami nour) is a quiet film. Like its middle-aged protagonist, the movie is straightforward and unaffected, and compellingly so. He\u2019s a Tehran physician, out on bail after being arrested for tending to wounded protesters. His medical license revoked by government authorities, his office ransacked and placed under official seal, he insists that he\u2019s \u201cno longer a doctor\u201d and has concluded that there\u2019s nothing left to live for. But as he moves through the day that he intends to be one of his last on earth, a sense of purpose persists and, crucially, something beyond it is reawakened.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn its understated celebration of the ties that bind us, Ali Asgari\u2019s absorbing drama, which he wrote with Shadmehr Rastin (whose credits include Jafar Panahi\u2019s Oscar-nominated feature It Was Just an Accident<\/a>), hardly says anything new. And yet it packs an undeniable wallop with its twinges of grief and flutters of absurdity. A Bit of Light would be potent under any circumstances, but within the context of this perilous moment in world history \u2014 the movie\u2019s events unfold as Tehranis are bracing for threatened American attacks \u2014 the soul-deep weariness and struggle for hope that it evokes will resonate with many audiences.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tA Bit of Light\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA stirring odyssey, daylong and low-key.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Misagh Zareh, Sadaf Asgari, Forouzan Jamshidnejad, Ramtin Daghigh, Mina Rahimzadeh
Director: Ali Asgari
Screenwriters: Ali Asgari, Shadmehr Rastin
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 29 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThe doctor at the story\u2019s center is played to muted perfection by Misagh Zareh. Arash, who\u2019s being hounded by intelligence service agents and has no interest in playing along, is at the opposite side of the authoritarian divide from the bureaucrat Zareh played in Mohammad Rasoulof\u2019s The Seed of the Sacred Fig<\/a> (another Academy Award contender). As he embarks on a day of tying up loose ends and relaying his drastic plan to his three siblings and mother, he has a stoic resolve, but every sigh and glance and infinitesimal shift in his demeanor suggests boundless depths of dammed-up emotion.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut he would deny this. Arash is certain he\u2019s being nothing but reasonable. Deed transfers and other necessary paperwork are already taken care of when he confronts his younger brother, Maziar (Ramtin Daghigh), in the movie\u2019s opening scene, handing the tearful man his spare car key and his cat. Arash\u2019s sisters will get his voluminous well-tended plants, setting off one of the movie\u2019s running visual jokes as the potted greenery turns into a portable jungle, first in the elevator of his apartment building and then in his car.<\/p>\n

\n\tAkbar (Mohammad Askari), the talkative janitor who tries Arash\u2019s patience as he helps him close up the apartment, is something of a clown, foolish and na\u00efve and provoking a touch of deadpan sarcasm in response. But he\u2019s certainly no villain like the doctor who will show up later to scold Arash, defrocked and traumatized though he is, for having dared to treat \u201crioters.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGiven that \u201cthis Trump guy is threatening to bomb here every day,\u201d Akbar offers to tape up Arash\u2019s windows, assuring him in the next breath that the \u201cprecision strikes\u201d won\u2019t harm civilians because \u201cTrump wouldn\u2019t lie.\u201d Taped-up windows become another funny\/sad motif, an emblem of the limits of self-protection in a world gone mad. In an intriguing footnote, Akbar also mentions the pending arrival of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that recently became an alarming headline story. (The war had already begun when Asgari was filming in Tehran, and the production moved to Turkey to complete its interior scenes.)<\/p>\n

\n\tA highlight of the film is Arash\u2019s conversation with younger sister Mahsa (Sadaf Asgari). Plant in hand, he arrives at the yoga studio where she teaches in time to see a class full of women in corpse pose \u2014 a moment that plays out with far more subtlety and impact than a written description might indicate. Having taken in her brother\u2019s shocking news, Mahsa shifts from stunned sarcasm to profound sympathy and probing philosophical dialogue. She understands that he\u2019s more sensitive and intuitive than the average bear: \u201cYour soul is exhausted, my dear,\u201d she tells him. In a line that goes to the heart of the movie, she suggests he consider the possibility that \u201csuffering and joy are not enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are references to recent tensions between Arash and his other sister, Masi (Forouzan Jamshidnejad), and after hearing his plan, she interrogates him with less compassion than her sister offered. But she\u2019s similarly interested in disproving the conclusion Arash has drawn from his recent ordeal: Why is self-destruction his only option? The siblings find distraction, of a sort, at an underground theater performance of a play that Masi\u2019s son, Siavash (Alireza Barabarian), is involved in. The scenario of the two-hander echoes the young actor\u2019s offstage plans to leave the country, and it also stirs up the looming question of how Arash will tell his mother that he\u2019s leaving her for good. Once the four siblings, along with Arash\u2019s understandably dismayed cat, show up at the home of Mom (Mina Rahimzadeh) \u2014 or, as Maziar calls her, \u201cthe final boss\u201d \u2014 the burning existential etiquette question is \u201cDo we tell her before or after dinner?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAsgari, whose 2023 feature, Terrestrial Verses<\/a>, written and directed with Alireza Khatami, was fueled by a spirited poetic sensibility, here finds poetry in the prosaic. With the often fixed camera of Iman Tahsin, also the film\u2019s editor, A Bit of Light taps into a core aesthetic of modern Iranian cinema, holding its characters in a stillness that is charged with feeling. Abbas Kiarostami\u2019s suicide-themed (and open-ended) Taste of Cherry is another touchpoint. But in comparison with that movie\u2019s central character, Arash grows less single-minded as his daylong journey progresses.<\/p>\n

\n\tHis intended farewell tour is punctuated by continuing medical responsibilities. He pays a house call to one of the anti-government protesters he\u2019s been treating, a young man who\u2019s in dire shape from a bullet wound. \u201cDon\u2019t leave us alone, Doctor,\u201d the man\u2019s mother pleads. She\u2019s afraid that even worse would befall her boy if they went to a hospital, and Arash struggles to find a colleague to pick up where he\u2019ll leave off. Sometimes the work is the result of an unexpected intrusion, as when the daughter of one of his patients shows up, in desperate need of a prescription renewal for her father. To get her the proper paperwork will require a detour from his schedule for the day, and there\u2019s more than a little comedy, however subtly played by Zareh, in his exasperated response to this change of plans.<\/p>\n

\n\tInterconnectedness, the movie acknowledges, can be annoying as well as nourishing. But each deviation from Arash\u2019s carefully composed end-of-story script, whether in the form of an old woman asking him to carry her groceries or a sobbing Maziar urging him to snap out of it with sex and inebriants, can be a burst, a bit, a hint of light. That interruptions and diversions shape our lives no less than purposeful strides is not a novel idea, but it plays out here with particular elegance and zing as this fluently crafted story draws to its simple pow of a final moment, when a small living room is transformed by an irresistible tune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As its modest title suggests, A Bit of Light (Kami nour) is a quiet film. Like its middle-aged…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":767539,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,585,2839,56,54,55,234534,10306,250214,253352],"class_list":["post-767538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-iran","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-venice-2026","tag-venice-film-festival","tag-venice-film-festival-2026","tag-venice-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=767538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/767539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=767538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=767538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=767538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}