In Hijamat, Nader Saeivar turns a family conflict into a profound meditation on faith and identity.
Nader Saeivar‘s fourth feature, made without Jafar Panahi by his side for the first time in years, turns a Berlin living room into the site of a quiet reckoning with faith, blood, and belonging. There is a particular kind of stillness that settles over a Crystal Globe premiere when the film on screen isn’t trying to impress anyone. Hijamat, which had its world premiere at the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, arrives without spectacle.
Set within a devout Turkish-German Muslim family in Berlin, the film opens on Murat, a man who has built his life, brick by careful brick, on the certainty of his beliefs, and then spends the next 103 minutes dismantling that certainty with unnerving patience.
The plot, on paper, sounds almost simple: Murat’s younger brother Kerem is gay, the secret comes out, and the family fractures along fault lines that were always there, just never named. But the director is not interested in the mechanics of a coming-out story. What he’s really filming is the slow-motion collapse of a man’s internal architecture, the moment a person realises the walls they mistook for load-bearing were never holding anything up at all. Kida Khodr Ramadan, as Murat, carries this with a weight that never tips into melodrama; Jael Cem Ilhan‘s Kerem is quieter still, and the two actors do most of their heaviest work in silence, in the space between what is said and what everyone in the room already knows.
Although the film swings heavily on religious bias, there is a bit of restraint. The title itself, Hijamat, the traditional practice of wet cupping, drawing out what he calls the body’s “dirty blood” as a metaphor for the psychological toxins we build walls around rather than face, is a slightly on-the-nose conceit for a film that is otherwise so careful. Still, it earns its place because the film never lets the metaphor do the emotional labour for it.
The confrontations between father, sons, and Murat’s wife Leyla (Nicolette Krebitz) are staged with an almost documentary bluntness, nothing softened, nothing resolved too neatly.
What makes the premiere doubly poignant is who wasn’t there. Hijamat was produced and edited by Jafar Panahi, Nader Saeivar’s long-time collaborator and co-writer on last year’s Palme d’Or winner, It Was Just an Accident, but Panahi remained in Iran, his passport confiscated, facing another possible prison term. The director walked the Karlovy Vary red carpet alone, a fact that hangs over the film’s Berlin-set story of exile and rupture in ways that feel almost too resonant to be coincidental. He himself left Iran mid-shoot by accident, making Hijamat his first feature made entirely outside the country, and it shows in the way the film treats displacement not as a backdrop but as its own quiet character.
Whether Hijamat contends for the Crystal Globe itself remains to be seen; there is no easy audience to move.
The 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival runs from July 3 to 11, 2026.
