2026 • 87 min
A Bit of Light
Kami Nour
This movie was screened on
Synopsis
An Iranian doctor, after being arrested and seeing his clinic shut down, progressively loses what gave shape to his existence: his work, his ability to heal, his professional identity and, with it, a precise ethical idea of himself. When medicine is taken away from him, he does not merely lose a profession, but the function through which he felt necessary to others. And so he decides to die.
Before doing so, however, he wants to put things in order. Not so much his own life as what will remain after him. He therefore embarks on a final journey through his family: he meets his brother, to whom he entrusts his cat, his sisters, to whom he gives his plants, distributing objects, responsibilities, small fragments of his everyday life. Even his patients enter, indirectly, into this meticulous inventory of absence. It is as though suicide had to be preceded by a domestic accounting, a kind of bureaucratic administration of his own death.
Review
9 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 11. September 2026
There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
— Albert Camus
Outside, little is seen, even though Iran is living under the threat of war. The bombings and political precariousness intrude only through sarcastic remarks about Trump's “truths”, while a man meticulously organises his own disappearance and the world continues to perpetuate the system of power. Even geopolitical absurdity thus assumes an ironic dimension in the protagonist's responses, who seems by now to have reached that region of existence in which even collective catastrophe appears less incomprehensible than his own.
Time narrows down to the final dinner with his mother and siblings. Everyone, except the mother, knows the reason for the gathering. She eats, talks, observes. The others remain silent. In the silence around the table, more eloquent than any confession, the project of death slowly begins to crack.
Nothing spectacular happens. No conversion, no miracle. Only a series of gestures, presences, needs and bonds that restore to the man the perception that he is still part of something. Perhaps loved. But above all, still useful.
A film that radically questions the reason why we continue to live.
And it does so without resorting either to the rhetoric of hope or to the emotional pornography of pain. Its protagonist is a doctor whom power has deprived of the possibility of practising his profession after his arrest and the closure of his clinic. But what is confiscated from him is not simply a job: it is the possibility of being what he believed himself to be.
The doctor is no longer a doctor. And when society prevents him from healing, it also takes away an essential part of his relationship with the world.
This is where Asgari performs the film's first truly interesting operation: he transforms a political condition into an ontological crisis. The problem is not merely living in an economically exhausted, politically unstable country, subjected to the threat of war and to the violence of a system capable of deciding who can work, who can speak, who can heal. The problem is that when a person is deprived of the possibility of practising that through which they recognise their own value, life itself risks becoming a profession.
But Asgari does not construct the suicidal choice as a spectacular gesture. He treats it almost as an administrative procedure. Things have to be put in order. The cat must be entrusted to his brother. The plants must be given to his sisters. The patients must be considered. Objects must be distributed. Instructions must be left. Things must be put in order.
Death thus becomes the final task.
And it is precisely here that the film finds its darkest humour. The protagonist's reactions, often dry, disconcerting, almost impassive, produce a remarkably effective short circuit: the private absurdity of suicide meets the public absurdity of war.
To die individually or to be killed collectively seem, for an instant, to become two different versions of the same world, incapable of attributing value to life.
And yet Kami nour is not a nihilistic film.
It is much subtler.
Because Asgari understands that authentic nihilism does not necessarily consist in desiring death. It can also consist in no longer being able to perceive one's own necessity.
The protagonist does not seem to ask life to be happy. He asks for something more elementary and perhaps more difficult: to still have a reason to feel necessary.
His last day thus becomes a paradoxical process of verification. He meets the people to whom he should say goodbye and, precisely in trying to take leave of them, discovers how much of a presence he still is in their lives.
The cat that will not eat without him, the plants, the patients, the family.
They are all different forms of the same evidence: no one exists entirely for themselves.
Here the film touches upon an enormous question without ever turning it into a lesson about life. Individual freedom, even the extreme freedom to decide over one's own death, is never entirely individual. Every existence is a network of consequences. What we call “I” is also what others have deposited within us and what we have deposited within them.
Suicide, therefore, is not presented as a simple private act. Not because the film wants to judge it, but because it wants to show its impossible solitude.
During the dinner, the siblings know, the mother does not: this simple asymmetry produces an almost unbearable tension. The table becomes a place suspended between normality and the irreparable. They eat while everyone knows that one of those present has already decided not to be there anymore.
And Asgari has the intelligence not to explain what could be explained.
He lets bodies, pauses, glances and, above all, silence speak.
The mother continues to be a mother because she does not yet know the truth. The siblings continue to be siblings because they know it and cannot say it. The protagonist is simultaneously the man who is about to die and the man who, for the first time in a long while, sees with an almost cruel clarity how necessary his presence still is.
It is not happiness that saves him; perhaps it is usefulness.
A seemingly unremarkable, even brutal word, but one that acquires a surprising existential density in the film. To be useful means still being part of the world. It means that someone needs us. That a part of reality would change if we disappeared.
Perhaps this is the metaphor of the title.
Not redemption. Not the promise of a better future. Not the healing of pain.
A minimal light, almost indecent in its modesty.
And seeing means understanding that suffering and happiness are not necessarily opposites, as the Buddhist sister argues. One does not have to disappear for the other to exist. One can be devastated and, at the same time, loved. One can live within an unbearable society and still find a moment of authentic closeness. One can stop believing in the future and yet discover that someone still counts on our present.
Perhaps this is the film's most mature passage: Asgari does not claim that life is beautiful. That would be too easy a conclusion and, above all, false in relation to the world he represents.
He says something much more interesting: life can be unbearable without being meaningless.
And meaning does not necessarily come from above, from politics, religion, success, money or some consoling promise of happiness. It can emerge from below, from the minimal substance of relationships: a person who waits, a cat to entrust to someone, a plant to water, a patient who still needs to be treated, a mother who does not yet know that her son is thinking of dying.
In this sense, the film is profoundly political precisely because it does not need to turn itself into a pamphlet.
The Iran Asgari portrays is a country in which economic precariousness, political oppression, war and uncertainty have almost become an atmospheric condition. The catastrophe does not need to occupy every frame: it is enough to know that it exists.
The war is outside, the crisis is inside, and between the two there is no longer a clear boundary.
Asgari, however, introduces into the film a form of irony that prevents it from sinking into miserabilism. It is a dry, even cruel irony, which gives the protagonist a non-heroic dignity. This man is not a martyr. He is not a walking symbol of Iranian resistance. Nor is he the classic cinematic character who suddenly discovers a reason to live.
He is a tired man, and it is precisely because he is tired that the film manages to be so credible.
Misagh Zareh carries the character through an extraordinarily restrained performance. His face often seems to precede the word and contradict it. Fatigue is never declared: it inhabits the body, the way he looks, the slowness of his gestures, that kind of emptied-out courtesy belonging to someone who has already begun to detach himself from the world.
The other performers work within this same economy of expression. No one seeks effect. No one forces emotion. And precisely for this reason, when the film reaches the dinner, silence weighs more heavily than any monologue.
Asgari's direction is coherent with this choice: essential, clear, almost modest. It neither seeks to embellish suffering nor to aestheticise misery. The film proceeds with an almost clinical precision, appropriate to a protagonist who is a doctor and who, paradoxically, has lost the right to practise precisely the activity that defined his relationship with life.
Even formally, Kami nour therefore seems to question medicine: does healing not mean merely eliminating pain, but recognising that pain is part of the human condition and that sometimes what can be restored is not health, but relationship.
The doctor who can no longer heal others discovers, over the course of his final day, that perhaps it is the others who heal him.
Cinema, when it is truly cinema, knows that the simplest ideas are often those we have stopped seeing.
Kami nour literally refers to something connected to light; A Bit of Light gives it its international dimension. And the title is perfect precisely because it does not promise total illumination. Only a little light. Just enough to distinguish the edge of things in the dark.
Ali Asgari thus creates a film that is small only in scale and immense in its implications. A film about suicide that does not really speak of death, a film about war that does not need to show it continuously, a film about Iran that manages to speak of Iran without turning it into a postcard of suffering, a film about family that carefully avoids all sentimentality.
Above all, a film about survival that has nothing edifying about it.
Life has no meaning. But that doesn't matter in the least. — Emil Cioran
This movie was in the official competition of 83rd Venice International Film Festival 2026
