𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙽𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚒𝚜 𝙱𝚕𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐.

𝙷𝚒𝚓𝚊𝚖𝚊𝚝

𝙳𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝙽𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚛 𝚂𝚊𝚎𝚒𝚟𝚊𝚛

𝙺𝚟𝚒𝚏𝚏 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

Hijamat, or cupping therapy, begins by creating a wound in the hope of promoting healing. In this film, however, every new subplot and every emerging conflict opens another wound in the narrative itself—a wound that is abandoned before it has the chance to deepen, only to be replaced by the next.

Saeivar builds his film upon an accumulation of major themes: migration, tradition, religion, circumcision, homosexuality, the disintegration of the family, war, generational conflict, the Berlin Wall, and Europe’s historical memory. The problem is not the subjects themselves, but the way they enter and leave the narrative. Each dramatic thread disappears before it can take root in character, mise-en-scène, action, or visual form. One idea continually replaces another, leaving the viewer repeatedly wanting to say, "Wait." Slow down.

Having ideas alone is not enough to make a film. Cinema begins when an idea is transformed into image, action, relationships, space, and rhythm. Hijamat, however, expands the number of its themes far more than it develops its narrative. The ideas coexist, but they never grow into a coherent dramatic structure.

One of the film’s clearest structural weaknesses lies in its relationship with geography. Although the story unfolds in Berlin, Germany never becomes an active dramatic force. The city neither shapes its characters nor enters into a meaningful relationship with them. The Turkish immigrant community, German culture, and the city’s social landscape remain little more than background scenery. If Berlin were removed from the film, very little in the narrative would fundamentally change.

Despite portraying a family that has lived in Germany across three generations, the film never establishes why they emigrated in the first place or why they continue to live there. Migration functions merely as narrative information rather than as a lived experience.

The film opens with the circumcision ceremony of a seven-year-old boy—a celebration filled with music, dancing, and festivity around a religious tradition. Yet in the middle of this celebration, the child escapes from the crowd and hides in fear. He is not only overwhelmed by the anxiety surrounding his own circumcision but also witnesses threats and hostility directed toward his uncle because of his sexual orientation.

From its very first scene, the film places two profound wounds side by side through the eyes of a child: a child whose own body is subjected to ritual violence while simultaneously witnessing violence directed at someone else. This opening contains the potential to make him the emotional center of the entire narrative.

As the story progresses, however, that potential gradually disappears. Rather than becoming a fully realized character shaped by the accumulated wounds of several generations, the child increasingly serves a narrative function. His anxiety, sleepwalking, isolation, and fear remain little more than passing symptoms. The film never explores the psychological consequences of his behaviour, relationships, or personal journey.

Instead, he appears whenever the story requires his presence and quietly disappears once his narrative function has been fulfilled. His inner world never becomes a genuine dramatic force. As a result, one of Hijamat’s most compelling narrative possibilities—like many of its other ideas—is abandoned before it reaches dramatic maturity.

Among the film’s visual elements, the sofa emerges as one of its most significant recurring motifs. Repeatedly positioned at the center of the frame, it has the potential to become the home's visual memory. Murad’s wife is often seen sitting on it in silence—a silence that quietly reveals the emotional distance and gradual erosion of their marriage.

Earlier, the same sofa serves as the bed where two brothers sleep beneath a single blanket. Shortly afterward, Murad attempts to draw his wife into emotional and physical intimacy on that very sofa, only to be met with visible disgust and rejection. The scene becomes one of the clearest visual expressions of their fractured relationship.

Later, in front of his young son, Murad brings an axe down upon the same sofa and destroys it. This is one of the film’s rare moments in which a character’s inner conflict is expressed visually rather than verbally. Throughout the film, Murad struggles to keep his family together and urges others to remain calm. Yet in the end, the only way he can confront his own emotional collapse is through an act of violence directed at the domestic space itself. His rage no longer seems aimed at a piece of furniture, but at the very idea of home and family life.

The imam is another character who feels less rooted in Berlin's Turkish immigrant community than in the familiar archetype of Iranian social cinema. He expects unquestioned respect, and the film repeatedly emphasizes gestures such as people kissing his hand, evoking systems of religious authority and reverence familiar to Iranian audiences.

Yet the character acquires a more troubling ambiguity during his private healing sessions with young men. Under the guise of prayer and spiritual treatment, his physical contact with their bodies appears to extend beyond the boundaries of ritual. The film introduces this tension but ultimately retreats from it. It neither clarifies the implication nor follows it through dramatically. Once again, the character remains a collection of suggestive references rather than a fully realized human being shaped by the society and geography of the story's setting.

This ultimately raises a broader question: why is this story set within Berlin’s Turkish immigrant community at all?

Rather than emerging organically from this particular geography and culture, Hijamat often feels like a work of Iranian social cinema relocated to another country. The setting neither transforms the characters nor becomes essential to the dramatic structure.

The subplot involving Angelika and the Serbian woman illustrates this fragmentation even more clearly. The Serbian woman is introduced to embody the lingering trauma of war, migration, and violence. At the same time, Angelika carries the historical wounds of Germany through the Berlin Wall, the loss of her child, and the gradual erosion of memory.

Yet neither woman fully becomes a character—instead, both function primarily as vessels for ideas.

Angelika communicates her past largely through explanation and symbolic references rather than through behaviour, silence, or human interaction. She wanders in search of her lost child, burdened by memories of her family, but the film never allows those memories to evolve into a lived emotional experience. Before she is allowed to exist as a person, she is already serving the screenplay’s larger thematic agenda.

The problem reaches its clearest expression in the sequence beside the Berlin Wall. Murad, who had earlier approached Angelika with patience and empathy, suddenly becomes a mouthpiece for direct symbolic statements. The shift emerges not from his character but from the screenplay’s desire to declare its ideas aloud. The Berlin Wall, death, memory, illness, and anger all converge within a single scene, yet the image itself generates very little meaning. Instead, meaning is imposed upon it from outside.

For me, this sequence recalled the desert scene in It Was Just an Accident—not because the narratives resemble one another, but because, in both moments, the characters temporarily cease to exist as human beings and instead become direct vehicles for the filmmakers’ ideas. In Hijamat, however, this rupture feels even more exposed. Rather than growing organically from the narrative, the sequence appears grafted onto it, interrupting the dramatic flow rather than deepening it.

Up to this point, I have tried to consider Hijamat independently of the names surrounding its production. Yet as the narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the influence of Jafar Panahi. That influence is evident not merely in the editing or the rhythm of individual scenes, but in the construction of moral situations, the dominance of dialogue over visual storytelling, and the tendency to transform characters into vehicles for ideas. Time and again, the characters speak where they should be living, announcing meaning directly instead of allowing it to emerge through image, action, and cinematic form.

Perhaps part of this problem also stems from the pace of filmmaking itself. When filmmakers move rapidly from one ambitious project to another, there is always the risk that powerful ideas will enter the film before they have matured into character, mise-en-scène, and dramatic rhythm. Hijamat does not suffer from a lack of ideas. Quite the opposite. Its central weakness lies in an abundance of ideas that are never given sufficient time to become cinema.

The film occasionally produces striking visual moments, yet they remain isolated islands rather than structural pillars of a coherent narrative.

Even the brother’s epileptic seizure merely joins the film’s growing catalogue of crises. Before its emotional or dramatic implications can be explored, the narrative has already shifted its attention elsewhere.

This same hesitation becomes most visible in the film’s final sequence.

After all the violence and emotional turmoil, Murad enters a space resembling a massage and meditation room, filled with Eastern decorative elements, soft lighting, and an atmosphere of apparent serenity that simultaneously carries subtle erotic overtones. If the film intends this scene to engage with Murad’s identity or sexual orientation, it once again stops short of transforming the idea into a fully cinematic experience. Instead, it settles for suggestion. Like so many of the film’s narrative threads, this one remains suspended between implication and abandonment.

Ultimately, Hijamat‘s greatest weakness is not the number of subjects it embraces, but the number it leaves behind. Nearly every narrative thread the film introduces with conviction is abandoned before reaching dramatic fulfillment. The child—who suffers from anxiety, sleepwalking, and the trauma of circumcision, and who could have become the emotional center of the story—never develops into a fully realized character. The same fate befalls most of the film’s subplots: they are introduced with urgency but relinquished before they can mature into character, action, or cinematic image.

Hijamat is undeniably ambitious in the subjects it chooses to confront. What it lacks is the patience to allow those subjects to grow into cinema. The film continues to open new wounds, yet rarely remains with any of them long enough to understand their consequences. Perhaps that is why its most accurate creative decision is its title. In the end, it is not the characters who bleed the most—it is the narrative itself.