Kimiya Va Khak (Alchemy and Soil) is a 2008 Iranian drama written and directed by Abbas Rafei, a filmmaker known for stories rooted in faith, conscience, and the moral weight of everyday choices.
What is Kimiya Va Khak about?
Set against a distinctly Iranian backdrop, Kimiya Va Khak follows characters whose lives are bound to the land they work and the beliefs they carry. The title pairs two opposing ideas — alchemy, the dream of turning the ordinary into gold, and soil, the plain earth that demands patience and labour. That tension drives the story: what people are willing to trade for a shortcut, and what they lose when they stop trusting the slow work of the ground beneath them. Rafei, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bahram Sahihi, keeps the drama intimate, letting conflicts unfold through family obligations, quiet confrontations, and the pull between material ambition and spiritual steadiness. At a compact ninety minutes, the film moves through its moral questions without ornament, in the tradition of Iranian social drama that finds its stakes in ordinary households rather than spectacle.
About the cast
The cast is led by Amir Mohammad Zand alongside Hosein Yari, one of Iranian cinema and television's most familiar dramatic leads, and veteran stage and screen actor Siavosh Tahmoures. Yari in particular built his reputation on restrained, morally burdened characters, and that register suits the film's contemplative tone. Tahmoures brings decades of theatrical experience to the supporting turn.
Context & significance
Abbas Rafei belongs to the generation of Iranian directors who came up through value-driven, socially conscious filmmaking in the 1990s and 2000s, often working with themes of sacrifice, belief, and rural or working-class life. Kimiya Va Khak, produced in 2008, sits squarely in that lineage. He directed and produced the film himself and shares writing credit with Bahram Sahihi. Persian-language dramas of this period rarely travelled widely outside Iran, which makes archival access to them valuable for diaspora viewers who want more than the festival-circuit titles.
Watching Kimiya Va Khak on K-Time
Kimiya Va Khak streams on K-Time in its original Persian audio. This page is free to read; to press play you just need to log in with a K-Time account. K-Time is built for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi-friendly interface across TV, web, and mobile, so films like this one are easy to find alongside the rest of the Persian catalogue.