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

“Remember the memory of your ancestors for it is the past we carry in our veins,” the opening epigraph of Aleem Bukhari’s short film Karmash insists. Drawn from the journals of the protagonist’s great-grandfather Babak Karmash, it hangs over the entire film. Moody and atmospheric, Bukhari doesn’t cleave out so much of a narrative as he does with inner states of being. It’s a film of faint edges, the sole character wordlessly aching for the lost. We don’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 ancestors’ customs and traditions have died out long back. This is a fascinating film—as subtle and flitting as a whisper.

Bukhari, who’s also shot the film, displays an arresting sense of image-making—his camera registering the city’s abscesses in haunting monochrome. We wander with the protagonist as he skulks through the alleys, the city’s very bowels. There’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. He’s abandoned by the city, which refuses to recognize him. He too has turned his back on it. The mutual abandonment reflects in the city’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 can’t be swatted away.

Karmash has an air that drifts between melancholy and yearning. The man is on the tip of an abyss—a mental wreck in the remains of a disappearing, or rather, erased culture. Of his tribe, he’s the last man standing, a relic of a people cast into oblivion. Gaunt, he’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, he’s become this amorphous entity. Half-defined, he’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. It’s all lost even as he struggles to pull them out of history’s ashes.

What’s particularly remarkable is Bukhari’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 Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes 2025.