“The Longest Night” (2001) is not merely a cinematic work but also a tribute to the personal suffering of a man who expressed pain in the most beautiful language possible. The late Iranian director Kiumars Pourahmad (1949–2023) left behind a poetic confession of himself in this film—a confession of fear, loss, anger, and love; a work born from the heart of his personal life and inner experiences, brought vividly to the screen.
In “The Longest Night”, the world is the size of a house—a house where Hamed spends his days and nights revisiting memories, a house whose walls silently witness the gradual collapse of a man. Every ringing of the telephone echoes like a mourning bell. Hamed, brilliantly portrayed by Mohammad Reza Foroutan, is trapped within these walls—a prisoner of his own mind and heart, confined in a deep void after the departure of his wife and daughter, in maddening isolation.
Foroutan’s tearful dance sequence is, without exaggeration, one of the most memorable in the history of Iranian cinema. It is this very image that immediately comes to mind when one hears the name “The Longest Night.” It was later said that Foroutan himself choreographed the movements for this dance, and perhaps it is this physical and emotional honesty that makes it so pure and affecting.
Pourahmad cleverly removes the exterior space to reveal the innermost wounds of man. This house is the realm of Hamed’s mind, where memory, regret, and longing intertwine. The entire film unfolds within this house, as if the outside world no longer exists—or if it does, it has nothing to do with him. Time seems to stand still here; day and night merge, and only the ticking of the clock attests to the meaningless passage of time.
On the night of his daughter’s birthday, which coincides with Yalda Night—or The Longest Night, from which the film’s English title is derived—Hamed decides to decorate the house as he did in previous years. But in his daughter’s absence, this joy turns into a lament of longing. Beneath the gentle fall of snow spray, he lights the sparklers one by one, dancing and crying. Hamed dances—not for joy, but for oblivion; not for show, but to survive. The dance evokes ancient rituals of mourning, a ritual for the death of love and the death of hope.
Pourahmad’s calm, nonjudgmental camera is the sole witness to this inner madness. The yellow light, trembling shadows, and the sound of firecrackers mingle with Hamed’s gasps, transforming a lonely man into a human still searching for light on the darkest night of the year.
Throughout the film, Hamed oscillates between death and hope. Sometimes he surrenders; sometimes he resists the silence by brewing tea, lighting candles, or playing music. In fact, “The Longest Night” is a film about continuing to live—a story of a man who, despite being broken, still refuses to raise his hands in surrender.
“The Longest Night” can be considered a manifesto of Pourahmad’s poetic cinema—a film in which cinema becomes the language of emotion, dream, and loneliness.
The film is a hymn to hope in the heart of despair. Within Hamed’s collapse, there is a kind of revelation; within his breaking, a kind of liberation. With rare honesty and tenderness, Pourahmad transforms his personal experience of loss and loneliness into a shared one.
Perhaps this is why, more than two decades later, “The Longest Night” is still worth watching, as it speaks to the pain of human loneliness—a pain that many people around the world have known and continue to experience.
