Mona & Parviz
2021 · 17m · Germany
Directed by Kevin Biele
Tones: darkly comic, tense
Immigration officers pay an unannounced visit to check on the marriage between café owner Mona and her husband Parviz, an Afghan refugee who wants to become a cook — and Mona must face them alone.
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The bureaucratic interrogation-of-a-marriage setup feels like it should collapse into either heavy-handed satire or earnest social drama, but Biele refuses both—the film's refusal to let you know exactly when to laugh or when to hold your breath is genuinely unsettling in a way most shorts don't bother attempting.
A formally precise examination of power dynamics nested within intimacy, where the construction of the scene—the staging of Mona alone against institutional authority—echoes a lineage of cinema concerned with the body under scrutiny, from Kiarostami to contemporary examination of borders and belonging.
The film's entire weight rests on Mona's performance—specifically the micro-moments where her certainty wavers, where she has to calculate whether to defend or perform—and that single oscillation between protection and exposure becomes the whole architecture of the piece.