‘Hijamat’ Review: A Gay Muslim and His Family Face Duty and Desire

A family of Turks living in Berlin is riven when one younger member’s queer sexuality emerges in drama Hijamat, the earnest but underwhelming latest from Iranian-Turkish writer-director Nader Saeivar, and a competitor for the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary this year.

Much is made in the film’s publicity and programming material of the involvement of auteur Jafar Panahi, who serves as the film’s editor and one of its three producers. He had the same credits for Saievar’s 2024 feature The Witness, one of several collaborations between the two. (Saievar co-wrote Panahi’s recent award-winner It Was Just an Accident and also was involved in Panahi’s features 3 Faces and No Bears.) However, this drawn out, sometimes clunky issues-driven drama lacks flow, although it has moments, including an oddly tacked-on but still compelling bit of scenery-chewing from a seldom-seen Nastassja Kinski as a mentally unwell neighbor.

Although, like Panahi, Saeivar has a reputation as something of a dissident within the Iranian film world, where he still teaches in a Tehran university and makes films that are openly critical of the regime, one can only wonder if some kind of self-censorship has muddled the clarity of his storytelling here. That’s an especially tempting conclusion since there are passages that take flight, not least a bravura opening sequence shot as a fluid oner that tracks a little boy arriving at a party as the feted guest of honor.

The occasion is the kid’s circumcision, and as the merriment takes hold (with separate areas for men and women) it all seems very jolly until word arrives that one member of the extended family, Kerem (Jael Cem Ilhan), is getting beaten up. As Kerem’s significantly older brother Murad (Kida Khodr Ramadan) tries to intervene, it emerges that the family is outraged by photographs that have circulated among them showing Kerem being intimate with a German man.

Murad and his Kosovan wife Leyla (Nicolette Krebitz), both of them more open to Western ways than others in the clan, are accepting of Kerem’s homosexuality. But that’s not true of Kerem and Murad’s father Ibrahim (Vedat Erincin), a stern patriarch who controls the family through tradition and money, having done well with restaurants both in Berlin and back home.

In fact, even Kerem himself is too tortured by fear to stand up to the family. He meekly goes along to get along when Ibrahim drags him off to the mosque where Sheikh (Aziz Capkurt), the local cleric, hectors him to confess his shame. But Sheikh’s motivations are not entirely religious. Murad knows that he’s in cahoots with a businessman back home who wants Ibrahim to sell a restaurant, and Sheikh is using his clerical position to leverage the situation.

Just when these various plot strands start to felt together into an overall narrative, Saeivar will weave in a new bundle of plot. Some screen time is given over to the breakdown being experienced by Margot (Kinski), a friend of Murad’s late mother who lives across the street from Ibrahim and is still disturbed by her experience of trying to escape into West Berlin from the east years ago. The subplot serves to remind us of how the city has been a refuge for immigrants of all kinds for years and that the trauma of violent escape echoes across generations, but it’s never worked into the main body of the drama satisfactorily.

Likewise, the late suggestion that Murad himself is tormented by feelings of attraction to men is awkwardly inserted and not especially convincing. But at least this reveal allows for another cameo from a German film star: Moritz Bleibtreu as a New Age healer in a ridiculous wig and headband get-up, who offers to fix Murad with some cupping therapy, also known as hijamat — hence the film title.