A Moment of Innocence

In 1974, the Iranian Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 17 years old and an anti-Shah militant, stabbed a young policeman during a raid. Subsequently, Makhmalbaf was shot and incarcerated. He was not released until four years later, during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Makhmalbaf launched a successful career as a filmmaker and as such was approached years later by the police officer he had stabbed; the man wanted to become an actor. That is where begins: a man arrives at the gate of the Makhmalbaf family home and is greeted by a smug little girl. From then on, the film unfolds like an ingenious game with past and present, with stagings and reconstructions, with idealism and treachery, and with the boundaries between fact and fiction. This turns the film into a striking combination of personal history, documentary and fiction. The director (who plays himself) and the policeman (Mirhadi Taiebi) cast and coach their young selves in the build-up to the shooting of the crucial incident, which took place 20 years before in a freezing,deserted passageway in Tehran. In 78 minutes, Makhmalbaf builds up to a climax in which love and decay, youth and old age, image and memory all converge.