Nader Saeivar’s ‘Hijamat’ Lands at Karlovy Vary as a Quiet Dispatch From Iran’s Young, Secular Turn

The Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary opens its 2026 programme this week with a film that, on paper, has little to do with the city’s colonnaded boulevards or its thermal springs. “Hijamat,” directed by the Iranian filmmaker Nader Saeivar and produced in collaboration with the dissident Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi, is set in Berlin and follows a man named after a German-Iranian family navigating a private crisis far from Tehran. Yet the picture, Saeivar told Variety in an interview published 29 June 2026 UTC, is also an oblique dispatch from inside the Islamic Republic — one that aims to register what he describes as “a sort of aversion towards religion among the young generation.”

The premise of the piece is straightforward. The execution is not. Saeivar has worked alongside Panahi since 2017, a partnership that places him inside a small circle of Iranian directors still producing work despite the constraints that have followed Panahi’s repeated detention by Iranian authorities. “Hijamat” arrives in Karlovy Vary as a festival title with a built-in geopolitical frame, but its method — a domestic drama set in Germany, written by a director working in exile-adjacent conditions — also illustrates how Iranian cinema continues to smuggle its hardest observations through genre and setting.

A filmmaker embedded in Panahi’s circle

Saeivar’s name has appeared in international coverage principally because of his collaboration with Panahi, one of the most recognised Iranian directors of the post-Kiarostami generation. Panahi’s own filmography — including “Taxi,” which won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2015 — has been built around working inside Iran despite periodic imprisonment and a long-standing ban on leaving the country, conditions that have made sustained collaboration with other filmmakers both difficult and politically freighted. Saeivar’s continuing role as a collaborator since 2017 places him in a small group of directors whose work is read internationally as a continuation of that project, even when the films themselves depart from overtly political subjects.

That is precisely the case with “Hijamat.” The film, as Saeivar described it to Variety, is set inside a German-Iranian household in Berlin and uses that household as the lens for what the director sees as a generational realignment back inside Iran — a shift he framed in terms of declining religious identification among younger Iranians rather than as a programmatic opposition manifesto. The choice of Berlin is, in that sense, diagnostic: it allows Saeivar to render a subject that would be difficult to film directly inside Iran, while keeping the social texture recognisable to audiences familiar with Iranian life.

Reading a country through its diaspora

Filmmakers working outside Iran have long used diaspora settings — Paris in particular, but also Los Angeles, Toronto and Berlin — as a way of addressing conditions inside the country that cannot be filmed there. The convention is now well-established enough that festival programmers, critics and Iranian audiences tend to read such settings as allegorical scaffolding rather than literal geography. Saeivar’s framing of “Hijamat” fits that pattern. The Berlin household is a stage on which a generational argument about religion, family and national identity can be staged at a safe distance from the censors and security services who would intervene on location.

The political economy of that choice matters. A director working with Panahi cannot shoot inside Iran without courting the same legal exposure that has defined Panahi’s career, including a 2010 arrest and a subsequent six-year prison sentence, later reduced, for what Iranian authorities described as propaganda activities. Producing in Germany — through German co-producers, German crews and German locations — converts a politically constrained project into a European festival commodity. The trade-off is real: the film circulates internationally, but the audience inside the country it depicts watches it through VPNs, festival re-runs and informal circulation rather than through theatrical release.

A generational claim, lightly stated

Saeivar’s description of “a sort of aversion towards religion among the young generation” is a notably measured way of stating what is, in survey form, one of the better-documented social shifts in contemporary Iran. Independent reporting on Iranian public opinion — including polling published by groups operating outside the country’s official statistical system — has consistently recorded high rates of self-reported non-religiosity among Iranians under thirty, alongside growing identification with secular, spiritual-but-not-religious or explicitly non-religious categories. Saeivar does not cite specific numbers; his framing is impressionistic, drawn from conversations and observation. The director’s choice to express the shift through a family drama rather than a documentary register is itself a kind of argument: that the change is best understood as a texture of everyday life rather than as a headline.

The structural frame here is familiar. Cinema produced in conditions of state constraint has repeatedly used domestic settings to register political and social claims that cannot be made directly. What is newer is the generational specificity. Where earlier cycles of Iranian art-house cinema — the new wave of the late 1990s and early 2000s — tended to foreground philosophical or allegorical registers, Saeivar’s framing points to a cohort for whom the question of religious identification is treated less as a matter of doctrine and more as a matter of cultural inheritance.

Stakes and what to watch

For Karlovy Vary, the arrival of “Hijamat” is a programming choice with downstream commercial and political consequences. The Czech festival, which runs annually in early July, has used its competition and special screenings to platform films from countries whose domestic distribution is constrained, and Iranian titles have appeared repeatedly in that role. For Saeivar, a Karlovy Vary slot is a route into the European festival ecosystem that can convert into theatrical release, critical coverage and, eventually, sustained co-production finance. For Iranian audiences, the film’s existence is itself a form of circulation: even when it cannot be screened inside Iran, it can be discussed, subtitled into Persian, and argued over in the diasporic press.

The plausible counter-reading is that a Berlin-set family drama tells us less about Iran than its director intends. Diaspora cinema has a track record of importing metropolitan European preoccupations and dressing them in Iranian clothing; the question of whether “Hijamat” documents a generational break or simply renders the cosmopolitan Iranian-European bourgeoisie’s self-image is one that audiences and critics will press. The dominant reading, however, is that the film is doing exactly what it claims — using a Berlin household to make a quietly polemical point about how Iranians under thirty relate to organised religion. The two readings are not mutually exclusive, and the festival circuit will arbitrate between them over the coming months.

What remains genuinely uncertain is whether the generational shift Saeivar describes will register on screen with the specificity the topic demands, or whether the film’s Berlin setting will dilute it. The source material for this article — the Variety interview published 29 June 2026 UTC — does not include festival reviews or early critical response, and the editorial frame rests on Saeivar’s own characterisation of his work. The picture itself, once it screens in Karlovy Vary, will supply the evidence the interviews cannot.

How Monexus framed this: the wire trade published a director profile; Monexus reads it as a window onto how Iranian cinema is registering a documented generational shift, with the festival slot itself as part of the story.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jafar_Panahi
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlovy_Vary_International_Film_Festival