A man comes home after years away, and the town he left behind refuses to give him easy answers. Bad Az Raftan (After Leaving), Reza Nejati's 2023 Iranian drama, puts Saber Abar at the head of its cast and follows a returnee searching for someone who has vanished without a trace.
What is Bad Az Raftan about?
Arash has been gone a long time — long enough that the streets of his hometown feel both familiar and foreign when he finally steps back into them. He has not returned for nostalgia. Someone close to him is missing, and every door he knocks on opens onto half-truths, old grudges, and memories people would rather leave buried. The longer he searches, the clearer it becomes that his own departure years earlier is tangled up in what happened after it. Nejati builds the story as a slow accumulation of encounters, each conversation peeling back another layer of the town's silence, until the search for a missing person becomes a reckoning with everything Arash left unfinished.
About the cast
Saber Abar, one of the most respected dramatic actors of his generation in Iranian cinema, anchors the film with the kind of interior, restrained performance he is known for. Elaheh Afshari plays opposite him in a role that carries much of the story's emotional weight, and veteran presence Khosro Ahmadi rounds out the principal cast. The film rests almost entirely on faces and pauses rather than plot mechanics, which makes the casting decisive.
Context & significance
Bad Az Raftan belongs to a durable strand of Iranian art-house drama: the homecoming film, where a return to a birthplace forces a character to confront what absence has cost. Running a compact 90 minutes, Nejati's feature favours quiet observation over melodrama — a register familiar to viewers of contemporary Iranian social realism. For diaspora audiences in particular, its themes of leaving, staying away, and the debts that accumulate in between tend to land with unusual force.
Watching Bad Az Raftan on K-Time
Bad Az Raftan is available to stream on K-Time in its original Persian audio. Anyone can read this page; a free K-Time account login is all that stands between you and the film itself. The platform is built for Persian speakers abroad, with a Farsi interface throughout.