P A I K A R

Reviewed by Sunchica Unevska

Even the world is not enough if you don't have peace within yourself

Towards the film “Paikar” directed by Dawood Hilmandi, Netherlands/Afghanistan 2025, awarded the Fipresci Prize

“Paikar” is a story of survival. So says Afghan-Dutch author Dawood Hilmandi in his autobiographical documentary, in which he tries to find peace by searching for those lost connections with family, with the country, with himself. Displacement or migration, as he says, is not a search for opportunities for a better life, but an attempt to survive. Because living somewhere else does not mean that you will feel better, on the contrary, it is often the beginning of a search for yourself and your place in the world.

Paikar in Persian means warrior. That is Hilmandi's nickname at home, which, as often happens, will mark his life. He is a true “warrior” both, while searching for what was lost, and while struggling to find true meaning, but also when he faces the generational tradition of silence in their family, seeking answers to the questions that torment him. And most of all in his relationship with his father, the one who was their example and taught them everything, the one who armed them as children, teaching them to fight for what is sacred to them. But the life of his authoritarian father, a former mujahideen in Afghanistan, will change radically when they move to Iran and Iraq and when he goes from being a warrior to becoming an imam, writer and poet, which, however, will not break his silence and distance.

But when tragedy strikes their family, the repressed things come to the surface. The depth and pain that Hilmandi feels within herself are incredible, the visuals and music through which he tells his thoughts are incredible, the beauty and longing imprinted in them are incredible, but also the fear and anticipation. How to reconcile with the emptiness of separation, how to accept loneliness and loss, how to reconcile with the inevitable. The consequences of wars are terrible, the need to seek hideaway, but also the powerlessness due to distances, due to the lack of consolation that is usually brought by family, which has long since ceased to be.

Hilmandi manages to capture all of that with extraordinary power, that separation from his siblings, that lack of understanding and communication with his father, that need to find himself in that "undefined" space, in those sometimes beautiful, sometimes desolate landscapes. Their vitality, their pulsation, their strength don't even matter, as long as you don't have all of that within you, as long as you feel lonely, forgotten, lost, empty.

Returning to his country, traveling with his father suddenly changes things, not because it brings something different, but because it brings back that much-needed sense of belonging, of identity. It doesn't matter where, with whom, it doesn't matter if it's a wasteland today, it doesn't matter the content, the state, the places, no, what matters is the feeling, the conversation, the connection, the emotions, the place that fills you with memories, with those dear memories that were lost. Memories that can disappear in the rush of change, in the rush of inevitability, when you have to survive, to continue, to live.

This is exactly what Hilmandi is talking about and with which he manages to reach us so strongly. Life is not about finding a better place to live. As long as you don’t have peace, as long as you are searching for identity and a sense of belonging, as long as you feel lonely like a “leaf trembling in the wind”, as long as you feel torn apart without true connection, nothing can be the same. There is a curse in wandering around the world, that wandering in search of a better life. There is a curse in that feeling of sadness, of longing, of the need for togetherness. Because it doesn’t depend on the outside, but on the inside that you carry with you, from home, from your loved ones, from understanding and connection, from the feeling of the warmth of the family that knows how to console you even when it is the hardest. Without that, the world remains an endless landscape in which you will forever search for the true contours.