Stories by @sepanta_kazemi

The Snowman

The first snow falls on Oslo, clean and quiet. By morning, a woman is missing. In her yard, a snowman stands where it shouldn’t, watching the house like a warning. Detective Harry Hole steps into a case that feels wrong from the start. No struggle. No clear suspect. Only a pattern that starts to surface as more families break apart. Women vanish. Winter keeps erasing footprints. And after each disappearance, a snowman appears. Built with care. Placed with intent. Harry teams up with a sharp young investigator and follows the trail through suburb streets, cold apartments, and files no one wants reopened. The deeper they go, the more the case looks like a ritual. A killer who plans around weather. A killer who doesn’t rush. A killer who wants to be remembered. Oslo turns into a frozen maze. Witnesses misremember. Old cases echo the new ones. The police chase shadows while the snow keeps falling, covering evidence, covering guilt, covering fear. Harry realizes the snowmen aren’t trophies. They’re countdowns. As the storm closes in, Harry has to connect the past to the present before the next snowfall brings another perfect, silent figure. Another empty house. And another name erased by winter.

The Redeemer

Oslo, late November. The city dresses itself in Christmas lights, but the cold underneath is real. Crowds gather. Music plays. And somewhere behind the glow, a rifle is being assembled with steady hands. A Salvation Army street concert becomes the perfect cover for a killing. One shot. One body. Panic in the snow. The shooter disappears into the holiday rush like he was never there. Detective Harry Hole arrives to a scene that feels staged for maximum chaos. Witnesses clash. Timelines slip. A single clue suggests the assassin is trained, disciplined, and following a plan that started long before this night. As Harry hunts through Oslo’s back streets and quiet rooms, the case opens into two worlds. One is the city’s public face, charity, faith, and tradition. The other is hidden, built from old loyalties, old crimes, and men who learned to survive by becoming ruthless. The killer isn’t improvising. He’s correcting something. Every move points to a target beyond the first victim. Harry realizes the murder is not the end of the story. It’s the opening scene. With Christmas closing in, the pressure turns personal. Harry pushes past orders, past politics, past the limits of his own body. Because the next shot is already scheduled. And in a city singing carols, someone is about to deliver redemption at gunpoint.

The Devil’s Star

Oslo is sweating through a brutal summer when the first body turns up. A young woman lies in her apartment, staged with quiet precision. In her mouth, a small red five-pointed star. Not jewelry. Not a symbol of love. A signature. Detective Harry Hole returns to a department that barely trusts him. The case is high-profile, the city is on edge, and the pressure is political. Harry gets a new partner, a polished investigator from Security Police with perfect manners and unreadable motives. Together they follow a trail of victims who seem unrelated. Different neighborhoods. Different lives. One common detail. The star. Then the killings escalate. Each scene feels like a performance designed for an audience of one. Harry senses the murderer is not chasing attention. He’s testing the police. He’s testing Harry. And he’s hiding behind rules that only he understands. As Harry pushes into Oslo’s night world, the heat turns the city into a pressure cooker. Leads rot fast. Witnesses lie. Evidence points in two directions at once. Harry starts to suspect the worst. The killer is inside the investigation’s blind spot. When a private tragedy hits close to home, Harry breaks protocol and runs the case on instinct. He digs into old files, old grudges, and a pattern nobody wanted reopened. The more he learns, the clearer the trap becomes. Someone is manufacturing trust. Someone is writing the next crime scene in advance. And the final star is meant for Harry.

Nemesis

Oslo, mid-day. A man walks into a bank with a cap pulled low and a calm voice. He gives the teller a deadline. No alarms. No heroics. One mistake and someone dies. Minutes later, he’s gone. The cash is gone. And a woman lies dead. Detective Harry Hole takes the case and sees the detail that doesn’t fit. The robbery looks clean. Too clean. Like a message. Then Harry gets hit from the side. An old girlfriend is found murdered in her apartment, and the evidence points straight at him. The department tightens the leash. The press smells blood. Someone wants Harry chasing two fires at once. As the bank robber strikes again, the pattern sharpens. Precise timing. Controlled fear. A plan built around pressure, not chaos. Harry digs into money trails, security footage, and the quiet lives of people who think they’re invisible. Every step forward costs him trust, allies, and time. The deeper he goes, the more the two cases start to echo each other. Motive hides behind a personal history. Revenge wears a professional mask. And Harry realizes the killer isn’t running from the police. He’s leading them. Oslo turns into a clock. Every tick brings another deadline. Harry has one job. Find the mind behind the robberies. Clear his own name. And stop the next call that ends with a body on the floor.

The Redbreast

In wintry Oslo, a single gunshot opens a door nobody wants opened. Detective Harry Hole gets pulled off routine police work and into a case that feels political, sealed, and untouchable. A rare rifle surfaces. A chain of quiet meetings, erased files, and coded warnings follows. Someone has planned a killing with patience, skill, and a grudge that refuses to die. As Harry tracks the weapon’s path, the city’s present starts to blur into another Norway, one buried under the snow of history. Decades earlier, young men chose sides during the German occupation. Some chased glory. Some chased survival. One choice, made in the name of loyalty, poisoned everything that came after. The investigation tightens around a small circle of veterans and a secret they protected for a lifetime. Harry realizes the target is not random. The shooter is not hunting power. He is hunting a name. He is hunting closure. With a storm building over Oslo, Harry races through freezing streets and dim hallways where the past still breathes. Every clue points to the same truth. This is not a murder plot. This is a reckoning. And the bullet that’s coming was fired a long time ago.

Cockroaches

In Bangkok, the Norwegian ambassador is found dead in a seedy hotel room. The official story needs to stay clean. The truth will not. Detective Harry Hole is sent in to shut the case fast and keep it quiet. No headlines. No scandal. No loose ends. But the city does not cooperate. Heat presses in. Neon hides decay. Everyone smiles while they measure your price. Harry follows the trail from embassy corridors to backstreet bars, from polite handshakes to paid silence. Each answer opens a deeper problem. A web of corruption, secrets, and debts that reaches far past the victim. The killer is close. The motive is older than the crime. As pressure mounts from both governments and criminals, Harry realizes the case is not about one death. It is about what powerful people fear becoming public. In a city where truth gets buried fast, Harry has one job. Dig it up before it buries him.

The Bat

When a young Norwegian woman is found murdered in Sydney, detective Harry Hole is sent halfway around the world to assist Australian police on a case that feels both distant and uncomfortably personal. Out of his element and battling his own shadows, Harry follows a trail through nightclubs, back alleys, and the bright, deceptive calm of coastal suburbs. Each lead pulls him deeper into a city where everyone seems to be performing a role. Witnesses with selective memories. Friends with motives. Strangers who know more than they admit. As the investigation tightens, Harry begins to see a pattern. The killer is patient. The crimes are controlled. And the next move is already in motion. To stop what’s coming, Harry must decode the logic behind the violence and confront the part of himself that recognizes it. Because in Sydney, the danger is not hiding in the dark. It is watching from above.

Lost in a Good Book

Thursday Next tries to build a quiet life after her last case, but the world around her starts to fracture. A political storm rises. A lost Shakespeare play reappears at the perfect moment. The powerful Goliath Corporation moves in the shadows. A new threat targets Thursday’s family. Reality feels unstable and someone is rewriting lives. To fight back, Thursday pushes deeper into fiction than ever. She learns to “bookjump,” entering stories without machines. Inside the vast universe of literature she meets Jurisfiction, a secret police force that protects the order of books. Miss Havisham becomes her volatile mentor as Thursday trains, solves crises inside classic novels, and uncovers traces of a hidden enemy manipulating memories. As pressure mounts in the real world and inside fiction, Thursday races to expose the conspiracy behind the political rise of a dangerous figure, the stolen manuscript at the center of the chaos, and the force trying to erase parts of her life. She crosses between worlds, evades time-agents and corporate hunters, and chases the truth buried in her own memories. The story builds toward a showdown that tests Thursday’s loyalty to her family, her world, and the fragile boundary between fiction and reality.

The Eyre Affair

Thursday Next lives in a fractured England shaped by war, politics, and stories. Books affect reality. Criminals target novels to change the world outside them. Acheron Hades steals a device that opens doors into fiction. He enters Jane Eyre and removes Jane. Every copy of the book breaks. Chaos hits the country. Thursday follows him into the novel. Pages shift around her. Rochester senses she comes from another world. She pushes through traps, rescues Jane, and hunts Hades inside the story’s timeline. She kills him, sets the story back on track, and gives Jane and Rochester a true ending. Back home, she exposes Goliath’s failed weapon program and forces peace talks. She stops a wedding, reunites with her former fiancé, and steps into an uncertain future as the only person who moves between reality and fiction.

Signs Preceding the End of the World

Makina is a young woman who moves with quiet precision and sharp instincts. When word reaches her that her brother vanished somewhere in the United States, she steps into the desert with a single mission: cross the border and bring him home. The journey pulls her into a world built on whispers, debts, and shifting loyalties. She slips through cartel safe zones, rides with a coyote who may or may not be trustworthy, and survives a landscape where every shadow hides a threat. The border is not a line. It’s a maze. A test. A place where people vanish without a sound. On the other side, the world feels familiar and foreign at the same time. New streets, new rules, and a language that cuts off pieces of her identity. Makina is forced to navigate neighborhoods where migrants live in the cracks, where authority watches from behind dark glass, and where the wrong move can send someone back across the desert… or worse. But Makina doesn’t break. She observes. She adapts. She pushes forward. As the search draws her deeper into this strange new world, the trail toward her brother becomes more tangled, and Makina must decide how far she is willing to go — and how much of herself she is willing to lose — to bring her family together again. A tense, atmospheric journey through borders seen and unseen. A story about survival, identity, and the quiet strength of someone who refuses to disappear.

The Daughter of Time

Alan Grant, a sharp but restless Scotland Yard inspector, ends up stuck in a hospital bed after an accident. Bored and frustrated, he fixes his attention on a centuries-old portrait of King Richard III. Something in the face bothers him. The official story paints Richard as a monster who murdered two young princes to seize power. Grant starts to doubt that version. From inside his room, he turns the past into a living case. He studies old reports, questions accepted truths, and pulls in help from a quick-thinking young researcher and a pair of nurses who become unexpected allies. As the evidence grows, Grant is drawn deeper into a political puzzle that stretches across five hundred years. The more he learns, the more the lines blur between fact and legend, guilt and propaganda. What begins as a distraction becomes an investigation that challenges the foundations of a national myth. The film follows Grant’s search for the truth as he moves closer to an answer others stopped asking about long ago.

The Houses of Shahr-e Rey

A fallen king of the jinn crosses into the human world and steps into Shahr-e Rey wearing the shape of a man. The city greets him with narrow alleys, old houses, and lives that never stop moving. An old angel narrates his journey for young listeners, turning the story into a drifting, dreamlike tale. Jaloo enters the city with one purpose. He wants to understand humans. Their choices. Their silence. Their hunger for love and their talent for destroying it. Each house he enters shows a different face of humanity. Betrayal. Lies. fear. Greed. Rumors that grow into storms. Kindness that fades under pressure. Cruelty that hides behind ordinary smiles. He watches without speaking. He judges nothing. He only measures the distance between what people say and what they do. The city becomes a living map of human weakness and human desire. And Jaloo keeps moving, searching for meaning in every encounter. His path takes him through quiet homes, crowded streets, and the cold corridors of an institution where the line between truth and madness breaks apart. Every place brings him closer to understanding why humans struggle with themselves more than with any outside enemy. The story builds toward an unseen turn, but the heart of the journey lies in Jaloo’s quiet discovery. A supernatural king trying to read the soul of a city. A world larger, darker, and more fragile than he expected.

Parichehr

After eight years abroad, Farhad returns to Iran and steps into the world he once left behind. Wealth, status, and charm place him at the center of constant attention, yet his heart belongs to a single face. A girl from a forgotten dream. A memory from childhood. Her name is Fargol. Quiet, graceful, and raised in a modest family, she appears again in Farhad’s life like a fragile echo of the past. Their reunion sparks a love that feels destined, yet every step draws them into a web of class differences, family expectations, and a fate far harsher than either imagines. Farhad’s closest friend, Hooman, fights his own battle. A rich young man in love with a girl far outside his social circle. Their parallel struggles reflect a society where love and reality collide, and the cost of choosing the heart grows steep. But the true key to the story lies with an elderly woman named Parichehr. Her life, marked by heartbreak, secrets, and survival, becomes a mirror that reveals what love endures and what it destroys. As her past unfolds, Farhad and Fargol find their own future hanging in the balance. A romantic drama woven with social tensions

I Will Turn Off the Lights

Clarice, an Armenian housewife living in the oil city of Abadan, has spent seventeen years giving everything she has to her husband, her children, and the quiet routines of domestic life. Her days move in a careful rhythm. Familiar. Predictable. Almost invisible. But everything shifts when a new neighbor arrives. Emil, a forty-year-old widower, moves in next door with his young daughter and elderly mother. His presence is gentle yet unsettling. He reads poetry. He listens. He sees her. Something her husband, Artoush, has long forgotten how to do. As the two families grow closer, Clarice finds herself pulled toward a feeling she believed she had left behind long ago. Emil’s kindness becomes a mirror, reflecting the loneliness she has carried in silence. For the first time, she questions the life she built, the sacrifices she made, and the love she never received in return. Caught between duty and desire, Clarice must choose whether to remain the dependable woman everyone expects or to step into a life where her own needs finally matter. A quiet, intimate drama about longing, identity, and the courage to confront the shadows within.

Mrs. Ahoo's Husband

In 1930s Kermanshah, Seyed Miran Sarabi, a respected bakery owner and family man, leads a quiet life with his devoted wife Ahoo and their children. His world collapses when he encounters Homa, a young divorced dancer trapped in the orbit of a ruthless troupe master. What begins as sympathy turns into a dangerous obsession. Miran rescues Homa from her past, brings her into his home, and marries her, tearing apart the family he once cherished. Homa’s presence ignites a brutal domestic war. Ahoo fights to protect her family as Miran sinks deeper into desire, vanity, and the illusions of modernity sweeping Iran under Reza Shah. Homa, desperate for freedom, spirals into loneliness and moral decay. Miran, consumed by passion, loses his wealth, his honor, and nearly his sanity. When poverty strikes, Homa seeks divorce and Miran violently expels Ahoo from her own home. But when Miran plans to flee the city with Homa, Ahoo finally rises. In a moment of raw defiance, she confronts her husband in public and drags him back from ruin. Homa leaves Kermanshah with a stranger, swallowed by the same darkness she once tried to escape. Ahoo returns home with Miran, ready to rebuild what remains. A story of obsession, betrayal, and a woman’s quiet evolution into strength, The Husband of Ahoo Khanom unravels seven years of love and destruction in a world caught between tradition and forced modernity.

The Sorrows of Young Werther

The story follows Werther, a sensitive young artist who leaves behind everything familiar, hoping to escape the weight of his past. In his letters to his friend Wilhelm, he tries to understand his own heart, a heart that pulls him toward joy and despair with equal force. He settles in a quiet village in the spring of 1771, seeking rest, beauty, and a return to himself. But at a local gathering he meets Charlotte. She is kind, graceful, grounded — and already engaged to Albert. In that moment, Werther’s fate is sealed. What begins as admiration becomes an overwhelming love. Charlotte’s gentle presence becomes the center of his inner world. He spends long days speaking with her, walking with her, memorizing every gesture. She cares for him with warmth and honesty, yet always within the boundaries of loyalty to her fiancé. For Werther, this half-light becomes torture. He knows he cannot have her, yet cannot leave her. The conflict consumes him. His letters capture every shift of emotion — tenderness, jealousy, hope, guilt. The villagers around him seem cold, dull, hostile. He feels misunderstood, misplaced, trapped in a world that cannot hold the intensity of his feelings. Even his art dries up. Nature itself becomes an echo of his sorrow. Werther tries to leave the village, to free himself from the longing that is destroying him. But he returns, drawn back by a love that has already defined him. What he finds upon returning only deepens his despair. His guilt grows. His loneliness sharpens. His sense of shame and fear of public judgment haunt him. Werther sees no escape from the impossible triangle he is trapped in — Charlotte, Albert, and himself. To him, love becomes both a sanctuary and a prison, something sacred and yet unbearable. His final act emerges from a soul torn between passion, idealism, and the unbearable truth that the life he longs for will never exist. Werther’s name itself carries two meanings — “island” and “more precious” — perfectly capturing the essence of his character: isolated, idealistic, and set apart from the ordinary world by the sheer intensity of his heart.

Too Loud a Solitude

For thirty-five years, Hanta has lived in a damp underground chamber, alone with a rusty hydraulic press and mountains of discarded paper. By day he crushes banned books, forgotten manuscripts, and the quiet debris of a city that no longer cares for its own wisdom. By night he drinks, reads, thinks, and slips deeper into the strange world that only he seems to notice. Hanta is mocked by his coworkers and belittled by his boss, but none of them know the truth. Among the waves of wastepaper that flow into his basement, he finds rare volumes, sacred texts, forbidden ideas. Instead of destroying them, he hides them. He rescues them. He reads them until their words seep into his bones. He falls in love with the life inside the pages, a private romance built in the shadows. But the world above is changing. A new industrial monster arrives. A massive, efficient, modern press. A machine that crushes faster, cleaner, and without a trace of the human hesitation that still lingers in Hanta’s hands. Its arrival signals the end of small presses like his, the end of slow work, the end of accidental miracles. And with it comes the slow collapse of the only life he has ever known. Hanta watches as his intimate, fragile universe is swallowed by progress. The books he saved, the thoughts he carried, the rhythms of his lonely basement — all of them feel threatened by a future built on speed and indifference. As the world accelerates, Hanta holds tighter to the quiet beauty he discovered in the ruins. His story becomes a poetic struggle against forgetting. A fight to protect the soul of a city that is too busy to hear itself think. A final act of resistance from a man who spent his life crushing books but was shaped and saved by them.

Malakout

Malakout follows a tense night in a quiet provincial town. At eleven o’clock, a strange force enters the body of Mr. Maveddat. His three companions rush him through the dark streets to the only doctor available, a mysterious figure known as Dr. Sohrab Hatam. Inside Hatam’s isolated house, the group enters a world filled with fear and doubt. Hatam speaks with calm confidence and presents himself as a healer, but something in his voice feels off. His patient, Morteza Lachini, stays in another room. He is a man haunted by guilt and pain, waiting for the doctor to remove another piece of his own body. His presence adds a quiet pressure to the night. As the men talk, the truth behind the town, the doctor, and the past of each character starts to rise to the surface. Stories of sin, loss, and punishment connect them. Strange symbols appear in Hatam’s words. Lachini hints at a hidden crime. The unknown man in the group senses a darker pattern forming in the shadows of the house. What begins with a simple possession turns into a journey through fear, faith, and the thin line between healing and destruction. The town sleeps, unaware that a chain of events has started that will change every life inside that house. The night moves toward a breaking point. No one will leave untouched.

The Body of Farhad

In The Body of Farhad, the story is told by a woman who drifts between time, memory, and imagination — a figure once seen only as a painted image on a pen case from The Blind Owl, now stepping out of the artwork to speak for herself. As she moves from canvas to canvas, she becomes different women across history: a noblewoman of the Sasanian era, a shy girl with glasses, a modern model posing under studio lights. Each new form carries the same invisible weight — generations of women separated by centuries yet bound by a shared struggle for freedom, dignity, and a happiness that always seems to slip just out of reach. The narrative unfolds like a stream of consciousness, blending dreams, fragments of the past, and echoes of ancient myths. Through shifting identities and blurred realities, the film explores the unbroken chain of expectations, silence, and sacrifice imposed on women in a deeply traditional world. What emerges is the portrait of a woman who refuses to stay confined — not to a painting, not to a role, not to a destiny written for her. As she breaks through one identity after another, her defiance becomes the voice of countless women before her, carrying the timeless ache of longing and the fierce need to be seen. The Body of Farhad becomes a poetic, haunting meditation on womanhood across the ages — a story where history, dream, and rebellion intertwine in the search for a life that finally belongs to her.

The Life Before Us

Told through the eyes of a sharp, street-smart boy named Momo, the story unfolds inside a run-down apartment building where children with nowhere else to go are raised by Madame Rosa. Once a worker herself, Rosa has spent her later years caring for the kids who were born into lives as difficult as her own. Their mothers pay what they can, then disappear, leaving Rosa to become the only real family the children ever know. Momo has no memory of his parents; Rosa has raised him from the start, even after the small allowance meant for his care stopped coming. To him, she’s more than a guardian — she’s the center of his world, the person he’ll do anything to protect. Around them is a community pushed to the margins: people whose lives orbit around the same rough trade, workers, hustlers, and neighbors who scrape by day after day. Through Momo’s honest, unfiltered voice, we see their struggles without judgment — ordinary people trying to stay human in a place that often forgets them. Everything shifts when Rosa’s health begins to fail. Age and illness slowly pin her to her bed, and the woman who once held everyone together can no longer stand on her own. As her condition worsens, Momo is forced to confront a new reality: the woman who raised him needs a kind of care he is far too young to give. The Life Before Us becomes a tender portrait of love, survival, و the fragile bond between a boy searching for identity and the woman who gave him the only home he’s ever known — a story about dignity found in the most overlooked places.