A Moment of innocence = Bread and flower = Nun va goldoon

When film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf was seventeen, as a member of an anti-Shah militant group, he was arrested for knifing a policeman and ended up in the notorious torture chamber administered by the Shah’s hated SAVAK secret police. Twenty years later the policeman he wounded ended up auditioning for a role in one of his films. From that bizarre coincidence Makhmalbaf developed a script in which both the policeman and the activist have a chance to tell each side of their story on film. However, “A Moment of Innocence” is much more than a study in political perspective. As the two older men recruit young actors to play themselves on film, they must deal with both cinema’s ability to romanticise and falsify history, as well as having to explain to a younger generation the complicated history of Iran prior to the 1979 revolution. As the young actors struggle to understand the hatreds of the past, they also force the older men to understand their own mistakes and their own prejudices. This remarkable film, beautifully shot in the middle of a Teheran winter, is a celebration of the humanist impulse in history and also a remarkably optimistic celebration of young people which puts much of Hollywood’s cynical exploitation of youth to shame. In Farsi with English subtitles. Also distributed under the title “A Matter of Innocence”.