Cannes 2025 | Karmash Review: Aleem Bukhari바카라�s Short Film Is An Unnerving, Fractured Mood-piece On Cultural Erasure

바카라�Remember the memory of your ancestors for it is the past we carry in our veins,바카라� the opening epigraph of Aleem Bukhari바카라�s short film Karmash insists. Drawn from the journals of the protagonist바카라�s great-grandfather Babak Karmash, it hangs over the entire film. Moody and atmospheric, Bukhari doesn바카라�t cleave out so much of a narrative as he does with inner states of being. It바카라�s a film of faint edges, the sole character wordlessly aching for the lost. We don바카라�t even encounter anyone else. Except for a fleeting moment, the city appears hollowed out. Amidst desolation, the unnamed man searches for slivers of consciousness. His ancestors바카라� customs and traditions have died out long back. This is a fascinating film바카라�as subtle and flitting as a whisper.

Bukhari, who바카라�s also shot the film, displays an arresting sense of image-making바카라�his camera registering the city바카라�s abscesses in haunting monochrome. We wander with the protagonist as he skulks through the alleys, the city바카라�s very bowels. There바카라�s a looming sense of desertion, juxtaposed with caves that appear more inviting in their darkness. A running thread of a voiceover fills in on his roots. The man has been ostracised by the city-folks, his identity negated. His home is taken away. He바카라�s abandoned by the city, which refuses to recognize him. He too has turned his back on it. The mutual abandonment reflects in the city바카라�s derelict framing. As he inhabits its margins, Karmash plays out on a concentrated scale a sense of decay. Everything appears battered, barely held together. Sound design (Bukhari, Shahzain Ali Detho and Muhammad Ali Shaikh) adds a layer of creeping unease. In one scene, Taiko drums accentuate the doom. Is the man even there, or a restless ghost? How much of his memories are his own? The individual is a stand-in for a way of life that has gone adrift. Bukhari orchestrates the ominous undertones expertly. Slowly, the film gets under the skin, like an unnerving thought so intense it can바카라�t be swatted away.

Karmash has an air that drifts between melancholy and yearning. The man is on the tip of an abyss바카라�a mental wreck in the remains of a disappearing, or rather, erased culture. Of his tribe, he바카라�s the last man standing, a relic of a people cast into oblivion. Gaunt, he바카라�s not so much humanlike as sneakily bestial. In one particularly striking night-time shot, his crouching shadow looks identical to a dog loping near him.

Irfan Noor K plays him like a scavenger, his quest for any residue hungry, desperate. Lines between sanity and madness seem to blur. Without any kind of grip, he바카라�s become this amorphous entity. Half-defined, he바카라�s a fuzz, flailing to reinstate himself and the larger public memories he carries. In a city that has wiped out his tribe, nothing seems retrievable. It바카라�s all lost even as he struggles to pull them out of history바카라�s ashes.

What바카라�s particularly remarkable is Bukhari바카라�s fluency with seizing a wisp of a narrative and invoking an epic callback to a community. Through the last heir, things long-gone clobber for revival. Bukhari takes certain spaces and looks through what they hide in their undergrowth. Horror is the best tool to burrow through loss and the director cannily, fully leans into it. The score rattles, pokes and intensifies. In the garb of perfectly modulated horror, Karmash dips into the fallout of exclusion. There are no hectoring lessons, just a richly internal evocation, going from disorientation to a final waning away into the air. Aleem Bukhari has fashioned an exquisite, startlingly eerie work, staring deep into gaps between the earthly and otherworldly. It's chillingly singular.

Karmash premiered in Directors바카라� Fortnight at Cannes 2025.