A Moment of Innocence

At seventeen, during the Shah's rule, Mohsen Makhmalbaf stabbed a policeman at a demonstration and went to prison for it. Years later, at the open casting call he held for Salaam Cinema, that policeman turned up. This film came out of the encounter: the two men decide to restage the event together. Each picks somebody to play his younger self and tries to have his own version of the scene filmed. The memories do not match. The policeman remembers that day as a love story, the director as a political act, and both young actors start questioning the parts they have been handed. The final frame does something cinema rarely manages: it replaces the moment of violence with a gesture and freezes there. The difficulty is that the line between fiction and documentary is deliberately dissolved, several layers close up without some knowledge of recent Iranian history, and the pace is slow. Who it is for: viewers who love Iranian cinema and films about filmmaking. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a straightforward narrative.