A soldier's homecoming, not his battles, sits at the center of Goroohban (The Sergeant), Masud Kimiai's 1991 drama about what the war left behind in the men who fought it.
What is Goroohban about?
Sergeant Rostam Darre Kalaye is discharged after the front has taken its toll on his body and his nerves. He travels back home to northern Iran expecting to pick up the life he paused, but the years of absence have quietly redrawn it. His wife Golbakht and their young son have had to fend for themselves, working for others and carrying burdens that were never theirs to carry. The life Rostam counted on has been quietly rearranged in his absence, and coming home turns out to demand its own kind of endurance. What begins as a reunion turns into a slow, stubborn struggle: a man trained for one kind of fight discovering that civilian life demands another. Kimiai lets the tension climb steadily while keeping where it all lands for the screen.
About the cast
Ahmad Najafi carries the film, playing exhaustion and pride with restraint. Golchehre Sajadieh, one of the notable actresses of Iranian cinema, appears alongside him — Golbakht, the wife who held the household together through the war years, is the story's emotional counterweight — and Shahed Ahmadloo completes the credited cast.
Context & significance
Masud Kimiai is one of the defining names of Iranian cinema, and Goroohban applies themes long associated with his work — honor, loyalty and betrayal — to a resonant subject: the soldier coming back from the war. A 1991 release, it belongs to a strand of Iranian films that looked at returning soldiers not as heroes on posters but as ordinary men re-entering daily life with wounds nobody could see. At 86 minutes it is one of Kimiai's tighter works, moving between drama and thriller registers.
Watching Goroohban on K-Time
Goroohban streams on K-Time with a Farsi-first interface built for the Iranian diaspora. The page you are reading is open to everyone; to press play you only need to log in with a K-Time account.