A Moment of Innocence (Film)

1995. Dir: Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Co-produced by MK2. The Iranian title, Nun Va Goldoony means 'The bread and the vase', but Makhmalbaf 's French co-producer MK2 preferred A Moment of Innocence.





The Film:
"This picture (and with it the sequence and the entire film) is a cinematic will to rewrite history, to remake the world, to revise its destiny, modify its verdict. Here Makhmalbaf the rebel is in full control of a cinematic urge to dismantle and dismember the fate of an entire nation. This is a deliberate act of mis-remembering history in order to let it forget itself—for its own good. Makhmalbaf himself may wish here to apologize, to seek forgiveness, to solicit absolution. But Makhmalbaf the filmmaker is after a much bigger fish—for there is nothing to forgive, and no one to forgive."

Kiarostami's influence is evident in the film's minimalist style and formal organisation, with title cards and clapperboards opening and ending scenes. But, more significantly, in the blurring between reality and its staged remake, A Moment of Innocence embodies the multiplicity of truth through 'a quiet erosion of the dead certainties, that separates the real from the make-belief, and that is precisely the trade-mark of the best of the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema'. These 'dead certainties' include the single-mindedness of terrorists who believe that there is no other course of action.

In the final freeze-frame, the veiled woman (representative of Iran's revolutionary Islamicisation) and the Young Policeman (emblem of the despised Pahlavi regime) are the astonished recipients of peace offerings. The image 'arrests' the moment where the past - Makhmalbaf's original terrorist act - is transfigured by the present - the young actors' spontaneous refusal of violence. But the 'moment of innocence' of the film's title could refer to numerous other meanings embedded in this image: Islamic militancy, revolutionary idealism, terrorism, law and order, adolescent romance, unrequited love, revenge and pacifism, and so on. This freeze-frame, which holds multiple competing ideologies within the same image, succinctly expresses Makhmalbaf's revised stance on his past: 'I no longer believe in absolutes and have accepted that I don't have all the right answers.'



Reception:
The film won the Special Jury Award at the Locarno Film Festival in 1996.

The film was banned in Iran until 1997.