From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Yek Mahal Dar Shahr-i Khali
This article is about the Iranian slow-cinema adaptation. For other Iranian works in the franchise, see South Asian and Middle Eastern adaptations.
Yek Mahal Dar Shahr-i Khali (A House in the Empty City) is a feature-length slow-cinema adaptation of Beach Surgery that transplants the narrative into post-industrial Iran, reframing the cycle of the engineer and the surgeon as a meditation on exile, return, and the impossibility of reunion. Shot in the aesthetic tradition of Kiarostami and Panahi—employing long static shots, minimal dialogue, and rigorous attention to light, dust, and the human figure against vast spaces—the film stages the unfinishable glitch as a structural refusal of conventional narrative resolution.
Narrative and Reframing
Leif is an exiled Iranian engineer who left his homeland fifteen years prior, seeking work abroad. He returns to his native region outside Tehran to find it transformed: the factories where he once worked are shuttered, the urban landscape hollowed out by deindustrialization and quiet emigration. Katita is the surgeon he was briefly married to—a marriage dissolved by circumstance and his departure.
Rather than a dramatic reunion, the film stages their repeated argument. They meet on the roof of an abandoned factory complex. The conversation they have is the same conversation they have repeatedly—the same words, in the same order, with the same silences and the same non-resolution. The cycle is not a supernatural loop; it is the existential return of two people who cannot bridge the gap between their past and present selves.
The three injuries become three rooms within the abandoned complex:
- Leif cannot see clearly (cataracts from years of industrial-dust exposure, unrepaired)
- Leif cannot walk without pain (legacy of a factory accident that cost him and the company millions)
- Leif's heart is irregular (metaphorically: the weight of exile, loss, and the impossible return)
Each injury is less a narrative device than a factual scar on his body—something he has learned to live with rather than something that will be healed.
Cinematic Approach
The entire film is composed of wide, static establishing shots that hold for extended periods (often 3–5 minutes without cutting). The camera is positioned at a distance from the two figures, making them small within the frame. The compositions are symmetrical, geometric, almost abstract. The factory becomes a landscape rather than a backdrop.
The use of color is muted: greys, browns, the occasional rust-red. The sky is often overcast. When light breaks through clouds, it illuminates dust particles in the air—thousands of tiny motes drifting. This becomes the dominant visual metaphor: what lingers, unseen.
The score is nearly absent. Instead, the film uses environmental sound design: wind across metal, the distant hum of an idling diesel generator, creaking metal, silence. When voices occur, they are often distanced or filtered as if heard through walls or distance.
Key Sequence: The Stone Recitation
In the film's structural center, the couple stands on the factory roof at dusk. The light is golden and low. Katita begins to recite a modified version of the tale of Rico the Architect, drawn from the original story. However, she speaks in Kurdish (a linguistic shift from the Farsi of prior scenes), and her recitation reframes the tale: instead of a city built inside a body, she describes a factory built inside a nation, the metal bones of industry becoming the country's interior.
As she speaks (in voice-over), the camera maintains its fixed wide shot. Leif does not move. The sequence lasts fourteen minutes without a cut. The only change is the light—it gradually darkens from golden to grey to near-black. By the end of her recitation, the two figures are silhouettes.
Katita (voice-over, in Kurdish): The architect could never see his own building, because there were no mirrors in the body. But the nation—the nation has mirrors. We are always looking at ourselves.— Yek Mahal Dar Shahr-i Khali, at 51:18
The dialogue is never translated in the film itself; non-Kurdish speakers experience it as beautiful, unintelligible sound.
The Final Act and the Loop
The film's final twenty-three minutes consist of a single, unbroken take of Leif and Katita driving toward the city at dawn. They sit in a car on a highway. The landscape passes: factories, power lines, dormitory buildings, then gradually the outskirts of Tehran.
They do not speak. The berimbau is absent; the only sound is the car's engine and the ambient noise of early morning traffic.
The car reaches the city limits. The frame cuts to black. The screen remains black for forty-five seconds—an eternity in cinema.
Then: the same factory roof. Dusk. The two figures stand where they began. The ambient sound design (wind, generator) resumes. The cycle restarts. The audience is invited to witness the refusal: no resolution, no revelation, only the return to the beginning.
Reception and Scholarly Attention
Yek Mahal Dar Shahr-i Khali premiered at the 2020 International Film Festival of Tehran and subsequently toured major festival circuits: Locarno (2021), Berlin (2021), Busan (2022). Critical response emphasized the film's resistance to conventional narrative catharsis and its grounding in specifically Iranian post-industrial geography.
A 2022 essay by scholar name redacted argues that the film's use of distance-shots and minimal dialogue instantiates the structural glitch at the level of form itself—that by refusing close-ups and emotional accessibility, the director has made the unresolvable distance between the characters into the visual grammar of the film.
The work has become canonical to discussions of how slow-cinema technique addresses the narrative impossibility at the core of Beach Surgery [citation needed].