The Mirror [Widescreen] [NTSC]

After her mother fails to pick her up after school, a young Iranian girl with a broken arm (Mina Mohammed-Khani) sets off to find her own way home. As she traverses the bustling streets of Tehran, clogged with the press of people, traffic, and noise, she grows increasingly uncertain of her direction and the correct route. The everyday sounds, movements and interactions of city life are conveyed through her experiences as she encounters strangers both helpful and indifferent, rides on buses, and is confronted with rules regarding male and female behaviour. Midway through, the film takes a startling turn that breaks the audience’s engagement with the narrative and throws the constructed nature of this naturalistic documentation of city life into relief. The actor playing the young girl suddenly abandons her character declaring that she has had enough of acting and wants to go home. As she leaves the set the crew decide to keep filming as she undergoes a process almost identical to that of her character in her attempts to find her way home on her own. Rather than functioning as a distancing device, this shift offers an alternate version of a reality mediated by cinema. The focus on the filmmaking process itself and the use of non-actors and children in lead roles are all characteristic hallmarks of recent Iranian cinema. In Farsi with English subtitles.