Set against 19th-century Egypt, Asad follows an enslaved man whose refusal to accept his masters' terms turns into a fight for the freedom of everyone bound alongside him.
What is Asad about?
The film opens on a life defined by other people's rules: work assigned, movement restricted, worth measured by usefulness rather than humanity. Asad, the man at its center, starts the story absorbing that arrangement the way generations before him did, until a moment of injustice makes absorbing it impossible. What follows is not a single act of defiance but a slow accumulation of them, as Asad pulls others toward a shared refusal that the people holding power over them never planned for. The film moves between the intimacy of one household and the wider unrest such a household can spark once word travels. Director Mohamed Diab frames the uprising less as spectacle and more as consequence — the natural, overdue result of a system that assumed silence was permanent. By the time the story reaches its final stretch, the question is no longer whether Asad will resist, but what freedom actually costs the people who finally take it.
About the cast
Mohamed Ramadan leads as Asad, with Razane Jammal, Aly Kassem, Kamel El Basha, Mustafa Shehata, Islam Mubark, Eiman Yousif, and Maged El Kedwany rounding out the ensemble of masters, allies, and fellow captives whose choices shape the uprising around him.
Context & significance
Asad is an Egyptian-Saudi co-production directed by Mohamed Diab and released in 2026, set during a period of Egyptian history when slavery still structured entire households and estates. The film sits in a small but growing lane of Middle Eastern historical dramas willing to look directly at that period rather than around it, using one man's revolt to open onto the larger, unresolved question of who counted as free.
Watching Asad on Ktime
Asad is available on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, letting Farsi-speaking viewers follow the uprising in their own language or with the original Arabic performances subtitled. Watching only requires a free K-Time account; the film's page can be browsed without signing in first.