Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 224: Fri Aug 12

A Moment of Innocence (Makhmalbaf, 1996): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm


A Q&A with director Mohsen Makhmalbaf follows this 35mm screening.

Chicago Reader review:
This 1996 film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of his most seminal and accessible—a reconstruction of a pivotal incident during his teens that landed him in prison for several years during the shah's regime. A fundamentalist and activist at the time, Makhmalbaf stabbed a policeman; as a consequence he was shot and arrested. Two decades later, while auditioning people to appear in his film Salaam Cinema, he encountered the same policeman, now unemployed, and the two wound up collaborating on this film about the incident involving them, trying (with separate cameras) to reconcile their versions of what happened. Though no doubt prompted in part by Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990), this is 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.” In Farsi with subtitles. 78 min.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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