Attock Review | Awais Gohar’s Incredibly Spare Short Film Chronicles A Child’s Mourning

The greatest of short films often derive from a single moment of unfathomable power and immensity. Ace cinematographer Awais Gohar’s short film, Attock, is tightly concentrated on a pivotal moment—a ten-year-old’s innocence collapsing, his initiation into loss, death and grief. The film opens with the pre-teen, Hadi (Ayyan Khan), on his way back home after school. Little does he know the shock awaiting him. Attock zooms into what appears tiny and inconsequential for parents, but momentous for a child. It’s a chasm. For a brief spell, Gohar tenderly lets us walk through emotional rupture. Healing is a long journey. Acknowledgement is the first step.

Gohar, who has also written, shot and edited the film, mostly excises dialogue. He retains only a shard of it—the most wrenching discovery of the pet’s killing. It’s one line with obliterating consequences. With casual brusqueness, Hadi’s mother (Tamkenat Mansoor) brushes off his steady questioning. Hadi is looking for his pigeon which has disappeared. Then comes the jolt. His father (Saad Zahid) is having the pigeon meat. It’s beneficial for illness. Doesn’t he remember? His mother insists, hurrying to set the meals. Hadi shoots a resenting, betrayed glance at his father. But there’s no angry confrontation. Gohar opts for a more inward tone. It is designed like a rite of passage for the boy. This is just an early gash.

Khan is a terrifically sensitive, subtle actor, both inhabiting and generously given space by Gohar to slowly temper the beats. Hadi walks up to his room, but restlessness yanks him out. A hole in the window feels like a cue to wander out, sit with his enormous inner churn out in the open. Hadi scampers away from the house. Internally, he seeks a coming to terms with the tidal wave of this loss.

Attock wastes no language or heightened conceit to verbalise it in some overwrought manner. Gohar, instead, trusts us to pick on the subterranean rhythms with which he delicately etches this definitive moment. It is heartache that blurs and blots out all other sensations. Images do the telling more than words can tap. Neither parent offers a conciliatory word to the child. The mother just shrugs off the incident as routine, nothing untoward. But he’s shattered. Attock intimately scans its staggering aftereffects. It does this with sobering, stunning brevity.

On his sophomore directorial short, Gohar invites us inside a child’s inner world. Loss can be so blinding that it shuts out everything else. All of perception darkens, except its absolute fixation upon the lost entity. It’s isolating, crushing and renders the world singularly awash in cruelty. When loss strikes, nothing makes sense any longer. Swathes of exquisite wide shots score the yawning depth of his wordless bereavement. He has lost a friend. But the film also wends, or at least indicates, into the next turning. What does acceptance look like?

The triumph of Attock is its miraculous ability to translate a very private feeling—a deep, all-encompassing void. Shadows mottling a building’s brick-red façade seem to have more personality and grace than the parents. Gohar leans into a languorous, breezy afternoon, evoking a sense of stretched time. We gauge the scramble inside Hadi as he strains for a grip on something. He meanders around, alone. Empty spaces reflect his desolation. On the street, he passes other boys, arm on shoulder, happy and seemingly unhurt. Khan realises an untethered quality. His gaze flits to pigeons peeking from a neighbour’s balcony.

As quiet and pared-back Attock is, it radiates this supreme confidence on Gohar’s part to play purely with visual elements. This is an intuitive work, its ear placed keenly upon a riven heart. It doesn’t wring for desperate consolation—just a bid to offer the boy company that’s been arbitrarily plucked away. Hadi keeps climbing till he feels as if the sky is sheltering him, gifting an open, unconditional solace where others have failed. The near-fantastical ending suggests compassion that the world seems incapable of. Gohar’s gaze is full of unspoken, unlaboured kindness. Stories like this one often taper and stumble into emotional invasion, a kind of cheapening tactic. A lesser director tends to dictate how we are to feel, preempting and spinning moments around such moods. Remarkably, Gohar sidesteps these, being more minute, observant and honest. I can’t wait to watch Gohar’s feature.

Attock will have its European premiere at the 72nd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2026.