Lunch Time
2017 · 15m · Iran
Directed by Alireza Ghasemi
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A sixteen-year-old girl arrives at a hospital to identify the body of her mother, but staff refuse to admit her due to her age and the absence of a guardian — a predicament that slowly reveals the harrowing circumstances of her family life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Sixteen minutes. Iranian short, sixteen-year-old at a hospital morgue, bureaucratic refusal as the entire moral container. Ghasemi is doing Farhadi-school restraint, which is the highest praise I can give. This is exactly what short film should do.
Ghasemi's Palme d'Or-nominated short achieves what few short films manage: it makes institutional inertia the instrument of character revelation, locating an entire social system's cruelty in the span of a lunch break.
Sixteen minutes in a hospital waiting room and the bureaucracy itself becomes the antagonist — a Vimeo Staff Pick Premiere that lets the horror surface obliquely. The withheld information does more work than any monologue could.
Reviews
The filmmaker successfully maintained viewer engagement and wrapped up the plot in such a short time frame — a look into what can be the harsh reality of many young girls in Iran.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival 2017
- Nashville Film Festival 2017, Best Short Film