The pedigree
2021 · 1m · Iran
Directed by Ali Pourahmadian, Artin Salahvarzi
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
A boy who has lost his father buries him, then meets a stranger who gives him a seed to plant — and the stranger and the boy turn out to be the same person.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
One minute long and it still has the audacity to pull off a narrative inversion that would make most feature films sweat — the stranger-as-future-self reveal could've been gimmicky, but instead it sits there like a stone dropped in still water, quiet and inevitable.
In the lineage of mythic cinema (Bresson's economy, perhaps a whisper of Tarkovsky's cyclical time), this operates as pure form: burial as planting, father as seed, present as future — each image a considered echo of the last, the whole thing a formal argument about loss and continuity made in exactly the time needed to make it.
The choice to compress a generation into a single gesture — one boy planting, one man watching — turns what could've been sentimentality into something that lands because of the specificity of that moment of recognition, where two timelines occupy the same frame and nothing needs explaining.