First Case, Second Case

Abbas Kiarostami's film, standing between documentary and fiction, which stayed banned in Iran for years. The setup is simple. Someone in a classroom keeps knocking on a desk during the lesson. The teacher cannot find the culprit and sends seven pupils out. His condition: either they name the one who did it and return to class, or they stay in the corridor all week. Kiarostami filmed two outcomes. In the first, one of the pupils gives up his friend's name. In the second, all seven stay silent. He then showed the two versions to educators, clerics, politicians and intellectuals and asked each of them which was the right conduct. The rest of the film is those answers, and the answers contradict one another. Timing turned the film into something else. Shooting finished at the end of the Shah's period and the commentators were figures of that time. After the revolution Kiarostami reshot the commentary sections and spoke to figures of the new administration. The film was banned all the same and stayed out of circulation for decades. So its subject stopped being the question of informing and became a document: the answers of two different regimes to the same question, side by side. An unusual document for anyone who likes Iranian cinema and formal experiment. It is short, but it tells no story; from beginning to end it is one question and a series of answers.