Director: Rasoul Sadrameli
Cast: Abolfazl Poor Arab, Dariush Arjmand, Nasrin Moghanloo, Enayat Bakhshi, Ali Sartipi
Ghorbani is a 1993 Iranian family-social drama directed by Rasoul Sadrameli, running 89 minutes. Rooted in a true story, the film dissects the corrosive dynamic between a young man consumed by resentment and the father he cannot forgive, using a child caught in the middle as its moral fulcrum.
What is Ghorbani about?
Majid is twenty-nine years old and carries a lifetime of grievances against his father, Haaj-Nosrat, a man he sees not as a parent but as a wall blocking every path forward. Unable to confront that anger directly, Majid channels it into something far more calculated: he decides to strike at what his father loves most. His younger brother — a ten-year-old boy who is the family's joy — becomes the target. Majid plans and carries out the kidnapping, setting in motion a chain of consequences that forces both men to reckon with what lies beneath years of silence and accumulated pain. The film never sensationalizes; it simply watches how love and hatred can grow from the same roots.
Cast & crew
Rasoul Sadrameli directs with his characteristically restrained hand. Abolfazl Poor Arab carries the weight of Majid's internal war, while Dariush Arjmand brings quiet authority to the father, Haaj-Nosrat. Nasrin Moghanloo, Enayat Bakhshi, Ali Sartipi, and Reza Ashtiani fill out a cast grounded in naturalistic performance, and young Milad Araghi is affecting as the boy at the center of the storm.
Context & significance
Iranian social cinema of the early 1990s was known for turning intimate domestic conflicts into wider moral inquiries, and Ghorbani sits squarely in that tradition. Sadrameli — whose later work reached international audiences — was already probing the fault lines inside the Iranian family unit: the weight of patriarchal expectation, the silence that builds between fathers and sons, and the way unprocessed emotion eventually finds a destructive outlet. For diaspora viewers who left Iran around or after the revolution, the film resonates on a personal frequency: it mirrors the intergenerational fractures that displacement and upheaval so often deepen. The true-story grounding gives it an additional gravity that pure fiction cannot replicate.
Where & how to watch
Ghorbani is available on K-Time with original Persian audio. Watch on the web, on your TV, or on your phone — no VPN needed, no geo-blocking, no extra download required. Start a subscription and cancel anytime.