- dir. Jafar Panahi
- year. 2003
- country. Iran
- run-time. 93 mins
- rating. 12
£5.00 (£3.50 conc.)
Doors - 6pm
Film - 7pm
Beginning in extraordinary fashion with a hold up on a Tehran jewellery store that ends in tragedy, the film then backtracks to detail the events that drove an essentially ordinary, decent man to crime. Directed by Jafar Panahi from a script by Abbas Kiarostami based on a true story, the flm guides us around Tehran, building into an engrossing and moving portrait of a man, Hussein feeling humiliated and essentially helpless in a world of social injustice, and a city split irrevocably between the privileged and the desperate.
Our cinema/cities strand will feature films were the city is central to the form and narrative of the film, whether that be through its architecture, the public and private urban spaces within them or the conditions in which the protagonist are forced to operate under. We will explore film used as an art form of the urban through short thematic seasons, beginning with ever present inequalities in urban life.
We encourage people to stay on after the screenings for an informal discussion of the films and the themes they raise.
“A quietly brilliant film, poetic and precise, witty, profoundly passionate”
“At once hardboiled and shockingly intimate”