Steven Soderbergh's crime drama weaves together several separate fronts of the drug trade into a single sprawling story, told from the perspective of the people fighting it, profiting from it and caught inside it.
What is Traffic about?
A newly appointed judge takes charge of the country's anti-drug efforts only to discover that his own teenage daughter is struggling with addiction at home, a contradiction that undercuts his public role from the start. In a separate thread, two agents work to protect an informant whose testimony could bring down a trafficking operation, while elsewhere the wife of an imprisoned drug figure steps in to keep the family's business running. The three storylines never fully merge, but each one exposes a different layer of the same system, from policy offices down to the street.
About the cast
Michael Douglas, Benicio del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Don Cheadle anchor the film's three main threads, with Tomás Milián, Russell G. Jones, Jacob Vargas and Amy Irving in key supporting roles across the story.
Context & significance
Traffic is a joint German-American production directed by Steven Soderbergh, built as a crime drama and thriller that moves between multiple locations and social classes to cover its subject from several angles at once. The film's structure — following separate characters whose paths only loosely connect — is one of its defining features, distinguishing it from a single-protagonist crime story.
Watching Traffic on Ktime
Traffic streams on K-Time with a free account login, and this title includes both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles. K-Time's platform is designed around a Farsi-first experience for the Iranian diaspora, covering browsing and account management as well as the film itself.