Director: Alireza Hosseinzadeh

Cast: Afshin Sang Chap, Alireza Mehran, Fatemeh Shokri, Heshmatolah Armide

Raze Khakestari is a 2022 Iranian drama film directed by Alireza Hosseinzadeh, running sixty minutes and centering on the collision between family loyalty, grief, and the Iranian legal system's application of qisas — the law of retributive justice — when a family is forced to confront the price of a brother's death.

What is Raze Khakestari about?

A young man has been convicted of killing his own brother and now faces qisas — the legally sanctioned punishment of retribution under Iranian law. Rather than petitioning for clemency or a financial settlement, the condemned man's own parents stand firm in demanding the sentence be carried out. The film unfolds in that agonizing space between verdict and execution, as the family grapples with grief, guilt, and an unresolvable moral weight. The story does not offer easy exits: every character is trapped by their own anguish and by a system that offers few alternatives. Hosseinzadeh keeps the camera close, letting silences do the work that words cannot, and building an atmosphere of suffocating inevitability without ever reducing the characters to symbols.

Cast & crew

Director Alireza Hosseinzadeh brings a restrained, observational style to a morally charged script. Lead actor Afshin Sang Chap anchors the film's emotional core as the condemned, while Alireza Mehran, Fatemeh Shokri, and Heshmatolah Armide give the parental figures a quiet, devastating credibility that prevents the story from sliding into melodrama.

Context & significance

Iranian cinema has long explored the tension between personal suffering and institutional authority, from the courtroom dramas of the 1990s to more recent intimate portraits of families in legal limbo. Raze Khakestari sits squarely in that lineage, using the qisas framework as a lens to examine how grief warps family bonds and how a law designed around justice can simultaneously feel both correct and unbearable. For diaspora viewers who left Iran while carrying memories of its courts, its silences, and its particular brand of collective sorrow, this film speaks in a language that needs no translation. It is the kind of short, dense drama that Iranian independent cinema does with rare precision.

Where & how to watch

Raze Khakestari is available on K-Time with original Persian audio and Persian subtitles. Watch on the web, on your TV, or on your phone — no VPN needed, no geo-blocking, and cancel anytime.