Asheghetam (2026) by Saleh Kashefi

FR | CH | IR | 2026 | 21 min | Drama, Queer Cinema, Romance, Politics

➡️ Where to Watch: Festival Scope — available till 6th of September

An underground rave in Tehran offers Raha and Niayesh something increasingly difficult to find outside: freedom. Music, dancing, queer desire and intimacy create a temporary world where young people can behave as though the restrictions surrounding them have disappeared. Then the morality police arrive and war erupts, collapsing the distance between private freedom and political reality.

Saleh Kashefi, working as Filmsaaz, responds to that violence through romance rather than conventional realism. Raha retreats deeper into an imagined emotional world with Niayesh, using love as a protective bubble against circumstances neither of them can control. Their relationship becomes more than romance; it becomes a way of psychologically surviving a world determined to deny them safety.

➡️ Movie Insight: Asheghetam transforms falling in love into an act of survival. Raha and Niayesh cannot control the political reality surrounding them, but they can temporarily control the emotional world they create together. Love becomes the last private territory authority and war have not completely taken away.

Asheghetam captures a generation for whom ordinary acts of youth can become politically charged. Dancing, partying, loving someone and expressing queer identity are not presented as rebellious because the characters necessarily want confrontation; they become rebellious because the surrounding system restricts the freedom to experience them openly.

The underground rave therefore carries enormous symbolic weight. It is simultaneously a party, a refuge and an alternative reality. When the morality police and war penetrate that space, the film asks what remains when even temporary escape is no longer safe.

➡️ Why It Matters: Asheghetam understands freedom through everyday human experiences rather than political slogans. Dancing, loving and imagining another life become meaningful precisely because those freedoms are under pressure. The film turns private intimacy into a powerful expression of resistance.

At only 21 minutes, Asheghetam compresses romance, politics, war, fantasy, animation and underground youth culture into an unusually concentrated cinematic experience. It is less interested in conventional narrative realism than in recreating what fear, desire and escape might actually feel like inside Raha’s mind.

That makes the film especially suited to viewers comfortable with experimental cinema. Live-action imagery, mixed techniques and 3D animation push the story toward something resembling a dream, nightmare and video game simultaneously, reflecting the increasingly unstable boundary between the world outside and the romantic illusion Raha wants to preserve.

➡️ Viewing Recommendation: Watch Asheghetam if you want politically engaged queer cinema that refuses conventional visual language. Its short runtime makes the experience concentrated rather than slight. The film turns romance, rave culture and fantasy into different expressions of the same desire for freedom.

Asheghetam made its world premiere at the 79th Locarno Film Festival in August 2026, competing in Pardi di domani’s Concorso Corti d’Autore. Its combination of queer romance, political resistance and experimental visual storytelling immediately distinguished it within a program designed to showcase ambitious short-form filmmaking.

That attention translated into a major result: Asheghetam won the Corti d’Autore — Independent Pardi di Domani Junior Jury award. The recognition gives a provocative work about queer Iranian youth an international platform while reinforcing the ability of short cinema to respond rapidly and creatively to contemporary political realities.

➡️ Viral Potential: Asheghetam contains an unusually powerful combination of queer love, rave culture, morality policing, war and experimental imagery. Those elements give the film immediate visual and political conversation value. Its strongest hook is simple enough to travel globally: two young people try to keep loving each other while the world around them burns.

Most romantic films ask whether two people can remain together. Asheghetam raises a more urgent possibility: what if being together is one of the only remaining ways to psychologically escape everything happening outside?

Raha’s romantic illusion therefore becomes central to the film’s meaning. Fantasy might appear like avoidance, but under extreme conditions imagination can become a survival mechanism. Creating another reality with Niayesh allows Raha to preserve desire, tenderness and personal identity when external reality is defined by repression and violence.

➡️ Cinema Insight: Asheghetam refuses to separate romance from politics because its characters do not have that luxury. Their relationship exists inside a world where identity, sexuality and freedom have political consequences. The romantic bubble becomes both an escape from reality and an argument for the reality they should be allowed to have.

Love as Resistance stories transform intimacy into something larger than private emotion. When governments, communities, war or social systems restrict people’s ability to live freely, choosing who to love can become an assertion of identity and personal autonomy.

Asheghetam pushes that idea into psychological territory. Raha and Niayesh cannot stop the morality police or the outbreak of war, but they can attempt to protect the emotional connection between them. Their romance creates a temporary space where another way of living remains imaginable.

➡️ Movie Trend: Love becomes resistance when intimacy preserves something the outside world is trying to suppress. Asheghetam turns queer romance into an emotional shelter against fear, control and violence. Raha and Niayesh survive by continuing to imagine that another reality remains possible.

The core audience is younger viewers drawn to queer cinema, experimental filmmaking, Iranian stories and politically engaged work. The rave setting, mixed-media aesthetic and emotional immediacy give Asheghetam a contemporary identity that can reach beyond traditional arthouse audiences.

Festival viewers and short-film audiences form another natural group. The 21-minute format allows Kashefi to experiment aggressively without needing to sustain a conventional feature structure, making the film particularly appealing to audiences interested in filmmakers testing new cinematic languages.

➡️ Audience Insight: Asheghetam speaks to audiences who understand personal freedom as something experienced through everyday life. Love, music, dancing and identity become emotionally immediate ways of discussing much larger political forces. That makes its resistance feel personal before it feels ideological.

Asheghetam demonstrates why short-form cinema remains important during periods of rapid political and cultural change. Its compact structure allows Kashefi to combine immediate contemporary anxieties with visual experimentation without translating the experience into the more conventional narrative expectations of feature filmmaking.

Its France-Switzerland-Iran identity also reflects the increasingly transnational nature of politically engaged independent cinema. Production support and international festival infrastructure can give filmmakers connected to restrictive environments opportunities to tell stories capable of reaching audiences far beyond their original cultural context.

➡️ Industry Insight: Short films can function as laboratories for politically urgent cinematic language. Asheghetam combines queer storytelling, animation, fantasy, romance and protest without choosing a single conventional genre. Its Locarno success demonstrates that formal experimentation can strengthen political storytelling rather than limiting its audience.

Asheghetam does not simply tell audiences that Raha wants to escape reality. Its filmmaking attempts to place viewers inside that escape, allowing fantasy and reality to bleed into one another as the outside world becomes increasingly threatening.

That approach makes the film’s experimentation emotionally functional. Distortion, animation and heightened imagery represent a mind attempting to maintain beauty, intimacy and control while political reality becomes impossible to ignore.

The concentrated timeframe gives the story urgency. An underground rave begins as a temporary space of liberation before morality policing and war transform the night into something increasingly dangerous.

Raha’s response gives the film its emotional structure. Instead of confronting those events through conventional political drama, the narrative retreats with Raha into romance and fantasy, making psychological escape part of the story itself.

Kashefi avoids turning the characters into symbols whose only purpose is delivering a political argument. Raha and Niayesh remain young people attempting to experience love, music and closeness while larger forces intrude upon their lives.

That perspective makes repression feel intimate. Political control is powerful precisely because it reaches into spaces that should be ordinary: parties, relationships, bodies and private emotions.

Baran Ghorbani’s Raha becomes the emotional centre of the film, carrying the tension between recognizing reality and desperately wanting to escape it. Raha’s retreat into romantic illusion works because the desire behind it feels emotionally understandable.

Elnour Torabi’s Niayesh provides the relationship with the intimacy necessary for the fantasy to matter. Their bond must feel valuable enough for audiences to understand why preserving it becomes Raha’s instinctive response to fear.

Cinematographers Alice Brunnquell and Arnaud Alberola work within a mixed-media approach that allows the imagery to move beyond straightforward realism. 3D animation and digitally manipulated imagery contribute to a world whose instability reflects Raha’s psychological state.

The resulting aesthetic connects contemporary digital culture with political cinema. Instead of presenting resistance through traditional realist imagery alone, Asheghetam uses the visual vocabulary of a generation accustomed to games, screens, digital identities and constantly shifting online realities.

At its core, Asheghetam is about the ability to imagine another life. Political repression attempts to determine what people can do publicly, while war threatens the basic assumption that there will even be a stable future in which freedom might eventually become possible.

Romance gives Raha an alternative. Loving Niayesh does not physically eliminate those dangers, but it preserves an emotional reality in which another version of life remains imaginable.

Escapism is often portrayed as weakness because it means refusing to confront reality. Asheghetam complicates that assumption by asking what happens when reality itself becomes almost unbearable.

Raha’s romantic bubble can therefore be read simultaneously as denial and resistance. Imagination becomes a method of protecting an inner life from forces capable of controlling almost everything else.

➡️ Creative Insight: Asheghetam turns romantic fantasy into a cinematic survival mechanism. Its experimental visuals allow viewers to experience the instability between external danger and internal escape. The film becomes most powerful when love, fantasy and political resistance become impossible to separate.

These films connect with Asheghetam through queer identity, political pressure and characters using intimacy or personal freedom to resist worlds determined to control them.

A retired Georgian teacher travels to Istanbul searching for her transgender niece and encounters people whose lives challenge her assumptions about identity, family and belonging.

➡️ Why It Connects: Crossing and Asheghetam both use queer lives to explore what happens when identity collides with social boundaries. Their characters find unexpected forms of connection while navigating environments shaped by cultural expectations. Both ultimately make human intimacy stronger than the categories intended to separate people.

➡️ Where to Watch: US | AU | CA | UK

A young writer begins living a secret life as a sex worker while transforming those experiences into material for his fiction. The separation between his public identity and private experiences gradually becomes harder to maintain.

➡️ Why It Connects: Sebastian and Asheghetam both explore young queer people creating private spaces where they can experience identities unavailable within their public lives. Fantasy, creativity and desire become methods of self-definition. Both films ask how long a private freedom can remain separated from external reality.

➡️ Where to Watch: US | CA | UK

A family in Tehran begins fracturing as political unrest intensifies and the father’s role within the judicial system creates fear and suspicion inside his own household.

➡️ Why It Connects: The Seed of the Sacred Fig and Asheghetam examine Iranian lives in which political authority can no longer be kept outside private spaces. One approaches that pressure through family paranoia while the other uses queer romance and fantasy. Both reveal the human cost when systems of control enter relationships, homes and identities.

➡️ If You Liked Insight: Crossing finds freedom through unexpected queer connection, Sebastian explores the tension between public identity and private liberation, and The Seed of the Sacred Fig shows political control entering the most intimate spaces of life. Asheghetam combines those concerns into one explosive 21-minute romantic fantasy. Together they show why personal freedom can become one of cinema’s most powerful forms of resistance.

Asheghetam is short, visually aggressive and politically direct, but its central idea is remarkably intimate. Raha and Niayesh want something ordinary — the ability to be together — inside circumstances that transform ordinary freedom into something dangerous.

Kashefi turns their romantic escape into both fantasy and protest. The world outside may be defined by morality policing, repression and war, but the emotional world between the lovers refuses to follow the same rules. That refusal gives the film its power.

➡️ Final Verdict: Asheghetam is a visually radical queer love story that transforms intimacy into resistance. Its experimental form makes political fear feel immediate without allowing that fear to completely overwhelm romance. In a world built around control, the film presents love as one remaining act of freedom.

Love as Resistance is becoming a powerful cinematic language because political control is often experienced most clearly through restrictions placed on ordinary private life. When people cannot safely dance, express their identity or choose who they love, intimacy stops being merely personal. Maintaining those experiences becomes a declaration that another way of living remains possible.

Asheghetam compresses that idea into one chaotic night. Raha and Niayesh cannot stop the forces surrounding them, but their romantic illusion protects the possibility of freedom inside their imaginations. Kashefi’s film ultimately suggests that resistance does not always begin with confrontation — sometimes it begins with refusing to let fear determine whom you are allowed to love.

➡️ Final Insight: Love becomes resistance when maintaining intimacy means refusing the reality imposed upon you. Asheghetam turns queer romance into a refuge where freedom can survive even as the outside world becomes more violent. Raha and Niayesh cannot escape reality forever, but for 21 minutes they show why imagining another one still matters.