Closed Curtain

An uneasy alliance forms between two people on the run: a young woman who went to an illicit beach party, and a screenwriter with a dog – deemed unclean by Islamic law, and so forbidden. The pair (played by co-director Kamboziya Partovi, also writer of The Circle, and My Favourite Cake’s Maryam Moghaddam) barricade themselves in a secluded villa with curtained windows on the shores of the Caspian Sea. But are they outlaws, or merely phantoms – figments conjured by a filmmaker no longer allowed to work? Then Jafar Panahi himself enters the scene and the curtains are literally, figuratively pulled open – or so it seems. In this twisty chamber piece, reality and fiction refuse to fully disentangle.