A Moment Of Innocence (Makhmalbaf, 1996): ICA Cinema, 7.30pm
This screening is from the excellent A Nos Amours film club run by film makers Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts. You can find out more about them via their Facebook page here.
Here is their introduction to tonight's programme: 'Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s cinema is tricky to define or pin down: what
exactly is the relationship between fact and fantasy? Is it a realist
fantasy or documentary? Cinema and everyday life blend dizzyingly,
reflexively into one another: in A Moment of Innocence
characters pitch for parts they are playing in the very film we are
watching, the past is re-staged and re-enacted in the present, and the
director pops up in front of camera (or at least his stand in!). Superficially
this is a story about a past misdemeanor reinterpreted through the lens
of hindsight. Mark Cousins has championed this remarkable, funny,
searingly beautiful film in his Story of Film. Unavailable in
the UK on DVD we are delighted to present on 35mm what we believe is a
very great film. Screening with Abbas Kiarostami's joyous and playful
short The Chorus.'
Chicago Reader review:
'This is one of the best features (1996) of the prolific and
unpredictable Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a dozen of whose
films are showing at the Film Center this month. It's also one of his
most seminal and accessible--a reconstruction of a pivotal incident
during his teens. At the time the shah was in power, and Makhmalbaf was a
fundamentalist activist. He stabbed a policeman, was shot and arrested,
and spent several years in prison. Two decades later, his politics
quite different, Makhmalbaf was auditioning people to appear in his film
Salaam Cinema, and among them was the policeman, now unemployed. The
two of them wound up collaborating on this film, which tries to
reconcile their separate versions of what happened with separate
cameras. No doubt it was prompted in part by Abbas Kiarostami's
remarkable Close-up (1990), another eclectic documentary that
reconstructs past events--a hoax that involved Makhmalbaf himself--with
two cameras (showing at the Film Center on April 24). But this is no
mere imitation; it's a fascinating humanist experiment and investigation
in its own right, full of warmth and humor as well as mystery. The
original Persian title, incidentally, translates as "Bread and Flower."'
Jonathan Rosenabum
Here is an extract.
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