Fish & Cat

Shahram Mokri's 2013 film consists of a single uninterrupted shot of a hundred and thirty-five minutes. A group of students set up camp by a lake for a kite festival; the cooks at the nearby restaurant watch them with strange attention. The film was inspired by the story of a restaurant in northern Iran said to have served human flesh in the late nineties. The real matter is not the single-take feat but what is done with time. When the camera leaves one character for another, the narrative sometimes runs backwards; you see the same moment a second time from beside someone else. Unbroken image and fragmented time operate at once. The cinematographer is Mahmud Kalari. The tension comes not from shown violence but from the constant approach of what is not shown. The film won the award for creative content in the Horizons section at Venice. Who it's for: viewers open to formal experiment who look for tension in slowness. Who it's not for: viewers expecting a horror film; violence is almost never visible and the pace is lowered on purpose.