Metrograph

Panahi plays himself in this ingeniously imagined and executed, vertigo-inducing rumination on the relationships between art and life, belief and evidence, and much else besides. Living in a rustic border town so as to remotely direct a film about an Iranian couple trying to secure fake passports that’s being shot on the other side of the Turkish border, Panahi gradually comes to the unsettling conclusion that the story of the movie he’s making has uncanny parallels to events he sees happening around him, and is participant in, during his off hours. “Panahi, whose courage and honesty are beyond doubt, has made a movie that calls those very qualities into question, a movie about its own ethical limits and aesthetic contradictions.” —The New York Times

Distributor: Janus Films