“Hijamat”, an interview with director Nader Saeivar

After premiering his first feature (Namo, 2020) at the Berlinale, his second (The End, 2022) in Busan, and collecting the Audience Award in Venice with the third (The Witness, 2024), acclaimed Berlin-based Iranian filmmaker Nader Saeivar celebrated the premiere of Hijamat, his fourth feature as a director, Czech style, at the 60th Karlovy Vary Film Festival (July 3-11, 2026).

The narrative pace and style of this contender for the Crystal Globe, set in Berlin amongst a rather instantly claustrophobic Turkish community presenting a boisterous mosaic of stifling religion-related conundrums, clearly bears the signature which has earned Saeivar international recognition as a screenwriter and regular collaborator of Jafar Panahi, especially for the latter’s 3 Faces (2018), which garnered the Best Screenplay award in Cannes, and of course for his more recent It Was Just an Accident, winner of the 2025 Palme d’Or, which they also wrote together.

This immediately recognisable footprint certainly also has to do with the fact that Jafar Panahi produced Hijamat, and served as the film’s editor as well.

A community’s diversity crushed by one rigid authority

The whole progression of Hijamat hinges on the irreconcilable contradiction between the evident diversity (of generations, of relationships with traditions, of “ways of being a Muslim”, or of sexual identities) existing even within this tight-knit community and the monolithic rigidity of what is considered acceptable by the local imam, whose prescriptions everyone in the community constantly seeks, on each and every subject of daily life, anchoring the hold of this religious authority on the private sphere, which becomes inexistant, and obliterating the individual itself.

In the case of the main character, Murad (Kida Khodr Ramadan), who takes it upon himself to support his brother Kerem, exposed as gay, the notion of sin which the imam systematically dangles over every situation manifests in the form of his stifling sense of duty, which clearly appears as a deeply internalised corollary concept from which Murad cannot escape, having chosen to stay repressed.

Berlin, and the mental walls people build around themselves

On the apparent paradox of having a variegated community and one single inescapable guiding principle: “I was really lucky that my first destination, when I emigrated, was Berlin, a very cosmopolitan, multicultural city where you cannot say which culture is the dominant culture. Many Germans believe that they themselves are foreigners in their own city. When I arrived in Berlin, discovering this multicultural city changed my way of thinking and of seeing things.”

“Then I realised that everybody, of all generations and ethnicities etc., had, all of them, one problem, and that’s the mental walls they build around themselves. You can see it very often in Berlin, everywhere. These walls are made of different materials, but all of them are really tall. For muslim communities for example, these walls are made of religion or superstitions, but for the Westerners, these walls are made of rigid laws and regulations and they think nothing can be changed, nothing can transcend that. So I decided that if I was going to live in Berlin, the first thing I was going to do is attack these walls.”

The meaning behind the title: drawing out the “dirty blood”

On the meaning of the “hijamat” in the film: The title refers to a technique frequently practiced in many Muslim countries, which involves placing cups on someone’s back to pull the skin into traction, which results in a laceration of the skin with drawing of blood into the cup.

Saeivar explains that as Murad feels that the community, whilst also offering protection, is controlling his life, dictating all the rules, “in order to overcome these rules, he changes his blood, takes out the dirty blood, which is the symbol of wrong beliefs, or outdated beliefs.”

As the conversation then moves to the many interesting, key characters in the film, which includes the young, sleepwalking son (the first character to appear, in the very first shot), the screenwriter-director adds that “in many religious, if you don’t change these outdated and wrong beliefs, old beliefs, if you don’t remove that blood, these things can happen again to the next generations, repeat themselves, as you can see through the son.”

Nastassja Kinski as the ghost of Germany’s past

Amongst the many motifs running through the film are the function of stories, painting, the Kosovar Muslim wife of Murad, Leyla (Nicolette Krebitz), and also the strictly peripheral presence of Berlin and Germany around this community, with the exception of one recurring figure – a disturbed German elderly woman played by Nastassja Kinski.

“The reason why I chose Nastassja Kinski for the role of Margot, says Nader Saeivar, is that she represents the glorious past of Germany and German cinema, as well as modern Germany, the reality of today, which is that what was once working does not work anymore. [She is consumed] by her memories, by the fact that she lives in the past. This is exactly what religion does in the East. What religion does in the East, memories and the past are doing to the Westerners.”

Plot