Director: Mohsen Abdolvahab, Rakhshan Banietemad
Cast: Bita Farrahi, Baran Kosari, Bahram Radan, Masoud Rayegan, Farid Valizadeh
Khoon Bazi is a 2006 Iranian drama film co-directed by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab, running 78 minutes and examining the fractured bond between a mother and daughter as addiction reshapes their world. Raw in tone and unflinching in its social gaze, it stands among the more quietly devastating Iranian films of its decade.
What is Khoon Bazi about?
A mother and adult daughter share a cramped Tehran existence marked by mutual need and mutual resentment. When the shadow of drug use enters their household, every small act of care curdles into accusation and every attempt at closeness reopens old wounds. The film charts the slow erosion of trust between two women who love each other but seem incapable of living without tearing at the fabric of that love. As circumstances grow harder, both women must confront choices that reveal who they truly are beneath the grief and habit. The story offers no clean resolution, only the honest weight of lives shaped by addiction and the complicated persistence of family.
Cast & crew
Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, one of Iran's most respected directors, brings her characteristic focus on working-class women's lives to this co-direction with Mohsen Abdolvahab. Bita Farrahi and Baran Kosari anchor the film as the conflicted mother-daughter pair, with Bahram Radan, Masoud Rayegan, and Farid Valizadeh in supporting roles that press the drama outward into the social world around the family.
Context & significance
Iranian social cinema has long found its sharpest lens in the family unit, and Khoon Bazi places that tradition in direct conversation with the country's drug-abuse crisis of the early 2000s. For diaspora audiences, the film lands differently than it might for a domestic Iranian viewer: the Tehran interiors, the rhythms of Persian speech under strain, and the particular way Iranian women navigate shame and love in private spaces carry a weight that is both culturally specific and universally human. Bani-Etemad's filmography, which spans decades of Iranian women's experience, gives Khoon Bazi added resonance as a document of lives rarely seen on screen outside Iran.
Where & how to watch
Khoon Bazi is available to stream on K-Time in its original Persian audio. No VPN is needed and no extra download is required — watch on the web, on your TV, or on your phone with a K-Time subscription. Cancel anytime.