It Was Just an Accident

jonathan fujii4.0

That’s how you end a movie right there

daniel goldhaber

When the cop pulls out the credit card machine………..

davidehrlich4.0

The first time that dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was imprisoned for his supposed crimes against the regime, he spent most of his time in solitary confinement, blindfolded whenever he was taken out to be interrogated. Deprived of the use of his eyes, Panahi focused all of his attention on his ears — he would obsessively listen for auditory clues around him, and fantasize about his captor’s identity based on the sound of his voice.When Panahi was imprisoned again 12 years later, he was placed in the general population with 300 other prisoners, most of whom had opposed the government in one way or another, but few of whom agreed on the best tactic of doing so. The filmmaker was unnerved — and compelled — by the inevitability of those disagreements becoming even sharper between these people after they were released; some traumatized former detainees would simply try to get on with their lives, while others would be consumed with a rage that bent them toward revenge.In his first project since the regime ostensibly lifted their restrictions on his art, Panahi draws from those very different prison experiences for a raw and blistering moral thriller about a hard-working Azeri man whose most tormented memories come rushing to the surface when he hears someone walk into his place of business with the same haunting squeak of his former torturer’s prosthetic right leg. Played by Vahid Mobasser, a TV station programmer and part-time cab driver, Vahid impulsively abducts the man (Ebrahim Azizi, the only professional actor in this extraordinary cast), drags him into the middle of the desert, and digs a hole big enough to bury his pain alive. But — as he begins to suffocate the hostage under a small mountain of dry earth — Vahid is confronted with a stab of doubt. The man, whom we know to be the father of an adorable daughter and the husband of a very pregnant wife, insists that he doesn’t have any idea what Vahid is talking about; that he never worked in a prison, and only lost his leg in an accident the previous year. Indeed, the scars in the flesh above his missing limb seem as if they’re still in the process of healing. And so, however cathartic it might be to simply commit murder and call it vengeance, Vahid feels as though he has no choice but to stuff the man into a wooden crate, load him into his minivan, and drive around Tehran in search of other ex-prisoners who might be able to help verify the captive’s identity.~this review continues on IndieWire~