Funfair
2019 · 15m · Iran
Directed by Kaveh Mazaheri
Genres: crime, dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tense
Deep in debt, Majid hatches a desperate plan: his wife Sarah will fake a car accident to claim insurance money — with their young son roped in to help.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise dangles a heist-crime setup, then refuses to milk it—instead it's a slow-motion portrait of a family suffocating under its own complicity, which is genuinely perverse and gets more uncomfortable the quieter it gets.
Mazaheri demonstrates formal restraint in the tradition of character-driven European drama, letting the moral architecture of the scheme unfold through spatial composition and the weight of unspoken shame rather than exposition.
The decision to keep the camera inside the family's nervous system—catching glances, hesitations, the child's dawning horror—rather than treating the accident setup as spectacle, is what makes this sting; it's a $0 choice that costs everything.
Reviews
Overall, Funfair plays out, as you'd expect, in a humorous fashion and is a strangely odd tale of family. Also, that last little button at the end is a doozy; well worth hanging around to the final second.