The Mirror

Jafar Panahi's film, which splits in two. In the first half there is a small girl named Mina. Her mother does not come to collect her after school. Her arm is in a cast and she tries to get home alone. She takes a bus, gets off in the wrong place, asks adults, and is lost in Tehran traffic. Then the film stops. The girl looks into the camera, says she does not want to act any more, takes off her microphone and leaves the set. The crew does not switch off. They keep following her, and the second half is that pursuit: a child genuinely trying to get home, a microphone working at a distance, and a camera coming after her. The question sits there: how large is the difference between the fiction of the first half and the real of the second. The girl gets lost again, asks adults again, and the camera watches again. The conversations heard in the background of the second half are part of the narrative too; people in the city talk about their own affairs and the film does not cut them. It won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno film festival in 1997. An important work for anyone who likes Iranian cinema and films that question the line between fiction and documentary. For a viewer expecting a straight narrative, the film breaks itself in the middle and never puts itself back together.