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.
About the cast
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.
Watching Ghorbani on Ktime
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.