By Ali Moosavi.
Instead of storyboards we make a 3-D model where we can have an aerial view of the action. We can then envisage the placement and movement of actors.”
–Shahram Mokri
Shahram Mokri and Nasim Ahmadpour are partners in work and partners in life. They write the screenplay together and Mokri then directs. Their professional relationship started with the film Fish and Cat (2013; see top image). This single-shot, 140-minute slasher movie, in which the only killing takes place offscreen in the very last frame of the film, made a big splash around the international film festivals and put the couple firmly on the map, winning prizes at the Venice Film Festival. It also established the blueprint for their future collaborations. Their films are composed of one long single-shot, have a circular format in terms of movement of the actors, go back and forth in time and show the same event from the viewpoint of different characters. A constant in their movies id the Iranian-Italian actor Babak Karimi (A Separation, The Salesman). Their collaboration continued with Invasion (2017), in which the police are reenacting a crime, Careless Crime (2020), which touched on a real historical event in which in 1978, in the midst of the Iranian Revolution, the Rex Cinema in the southern city of Abadan in Iran, while packed with people was set on fire and all the exit doors were locked from outside. 677 people were burned alive. The film again won a prize at Venice and also bagged the Hugo Silver award from the Chicago Film Festival. Their latest, and most ambitious film is Black Rabbit, White Rabbit (2025), which was a collaboration with Tajikistan and was selected as that country’s submission for the International Film Oscars. It is almost impossible to give even a brief description of the film as so many events are happening at the same time on the screen but different times in history. After each showing of Black Rabbit, White Rabbit at the Red Sea International Film Festival, where I interviewed them, the first question in the Q&A, both by the audience and the moderator was: what was the film about?! But interestingly at both showings of the film, the audience were hooked to the screen and some even attended both screenings, marvelling at the technical audacity of the filmmakers. Black Rabbit, White Rabbit was presented with the Best Film award by jury members Marco Müller and Juliette Binoche at the Hainan Film Festival in China.
Film International: How did your interest in cinema start?
Shahram Mokri: I was brought up in a film loving family. My father was a true cinephile. He collected film posters and photos pf actors and actresses. We have archived some of those, which form part of our family memories. My childhood coincided with the initial years of the Iranian Revolution when the access to fictional and story-telling media was very limited. Our father used to narrate stories using his album of movie stills as a lullaby to put us to sleep. I got to know movie characters such as Tarzan and Chisum through these albums. In those school essays where you write what you hope to become when you grow up, I used to write, an actor. Because I thought that would be the way to enter the world of cinema and really the only profession that I was aware of in the movie business was acting. Only later I became aware of directors through reading film magazines. In my teens I knew that I want to become a director.
Were there specific movies that watching them made you interested in directing?
SM: Those specific years that I am referring to here were in the early years of the Iranian Revolution when videos were banned. In the city where I grew up no films were being shown in cinemas. So from that point of view there was a void in my life which I could only fill with what was shown on TV, which tended to be dubbed Japanese movies and TV series. Later, when videos became available for rental, the majority were American films. So, I can say that my love for cinema started with the classic American movies. These were westerns such as The Magnificent Seven or The Searchers, and also French policiers starring Alain Delon – I did not know directors such as Jean-Pierre Melville. So I really mean American styles and genres such as crime and heist movies. Therefore, I cannot say that a specific film or director drew me into filmmaking, my love of cinema was more general.
What about you Nasim, did your interest in performing arts start from movies or theatre?
Nasim Ahmadpour: Shahram and I are of the same generation. We both grew up in cities outside the capital. My interest in theatre did not stem from watching plays as there were no plays being performed at those times in my town. I loved literature and wanted to study creative writing but the universities did not offer that course, so I selected the nearest course to it, Theatre and Playwriting, more because my love for literature than theatre. I became involved in theatre and started reading plays and putting on plays. I also started reading film magazines and joined the Iranian Youth Cinema Society.
SM: It’s interesting when we talk about that era that I think our imagination was stronger than what we experienced when watching movies. I mean reading about the plots of films in magazines, hearing about the films from others, or even from seeing stills and posters of movies, we created an image of the film which was more compelling than actually watching the film.
NA: I recall that I had read the book, Gone with the Wind at high school and then a friend of my father lent us the VHS of the film. I was so excited, but when I watched it, even with those amazing production values, I felt really bad. Compared to the novel, the film for me was disappointing.
SM: When we rented a VHS, we would watch it many times before returning it.
NA: Yes, whether it was good or bad didn’t make any difference. The cinema which we love now, is the result of chance and luck with regards to which films we were able to see.
You studied Cinema at university. We can say that in general there are two kinds of directors; those who studied cinema at college and those who just picked up a camera and started making short films. There are great directors in both categories. How much do you think studying film at college helped you and how did it affect your filmmaking?
SM: I always refer to a quote by Kevin Williamson (screenwriter of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer…). He says Slasher movies don’t turn people into killers but may make killers more creative! That’s how I feel about university, that it doesn’t make someone a filmmaker but can make filmmakers more creative. The main benefit of university is to provide you with a 4-year opportunity to focus on cinema, free of society’s burdens and daily family duties. It’s a very valid excuse for you to spend your time on cinema. But I also think that university can’t turn you into a filmmaker. You must have some natural ability which forms and takes shape in your childhood or youth. A love for cinema, a kind of routine of watching movies and a habit of thinking about films forms which then follows you into college where it can develop further, take shape and become compartmentalised. The university also shows you the connection between art and industry in cinema and introduces you to film production. I think I was very lucky to have excellent teachers and keen and able classmates, many of whom are now well-known filmmakers. I don’t always recommend studying cinema at university, but I think they can provide a better opportunity to focus on cinema and filmmaking.
Now that you teach cinema yourself at college, what do you teach your students to help them become filmmakers?
SM: I divide teaching cinema into two phases. The first phase is the techniques of filmmaking. In this phase I try to make them understand what cinema can do from a technical point of view. What are the different lenses, how to prepare a scene, the function of each scene in a screenplay. In the second phase, they need to understand why they want to make films, what is their viewpoint, why do they like this profession? I call this phase teaching or practicing cinematic worldview and I think this is the more important phase. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything to teach students about this because this is not something that you can achieve within your four years at college. What I teach them are the cinematic techniques but I’m always asking them to sacrifice technique in favour of the vision and perspective that they want to have in cinema. It takes years to achieve that vision. They must grapple with it and they may continually change it and look at things from a different perspective. It’s not something that is finite. You see the differences in cinematic vision when you pursue it academically in university and when you attend a workshop by Abbas Kiarostami. You don’t learn cinematic techniques in Kiarostami’s classes, you try to learn the viewpoint and perspective of a person to its environment. I belong to that group who teach techniques.
Your first collaboration was Fish and Cat (2013) which made a big splash and won multiple awards. Its single shot technique attracted a lot of attention. What made you use this technique and how did you cooperate in the screenplay?
NA: My association with Shahram’s filmmaking started after I had seen his short film The Dragonfly Storm (2002). We are both of the same generation and started communicating and seeing each other after that. One day Shahram came told me that he was making a single-shot short film called Limits of the Circle (2005). It wasn’t yet completed. He told me, I’m not sure what I have done! I watched the rushes and was in shock and awe. Those rushes had a magical quality which that film still has. It was the blueprint for all future Shahram movies. It was really amazing and it triggered our working relationship. I thought this looks like a stage play of the experimental types that I like, very different to the standard classical theatre. We had many conversations about Fish and Cat. Shahram wanted to add a narrative layer on to the single-shot, circular form that he had come up for Limits of the Circle. We tried several ideas and thought about what its equivalent in theatre would be.
SM: Nasim was working in theatre at that time. She was working with a theatrical group called Don Quixote. They were putting on a play called Pinocchio and were experimenting with overlaying text from various sources and finding a connection between them. In Pinocchio they had text from Waiting for Godot, poetry from William Blake, and so on. For me it was very interesting to see this idea of multi-layer texts in theatre and I was trying to create a twist in time using a single-shot long take technique in my short films. So perhaps this connection between experimental theatre with its multi layers and my experiments with adding different layers and playing with time in my short films provided the first steps in our working relationship. We would start with something akin to a theatre stage and then keep adding to it, layer by layer, as though we photoshop several moving images on top of each other and then remove the distance between these images and watch all the different images at the same time. We started this collaboration with Fish and Cat. In that film I had the initial idea and then with Nasim we worked on the details . We continued this collaboration with Invasion (2017), Careless Crime (2020) and Black Rabbit, White Rabbit (2025).
NA: My interest in theatre revolves around how I can connect theatre with other art forms, be it literature, painting, cinema or video. How we can extend the boundaries of theatre, and Shahram was experimenting with trying to move the borders in cinema from those defined by classical definitions of cinema. Even if he didn’t succeed, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.
When I watch your films, I always think they must be based on storyboards. I cannot see how they can come from a traditional written script. Is this how you conceive your movies?
SM: Instead of storyboards we make a 3-D model where we can have an aerial view of the action. We can then envisage the placement and movement of actors. Since I always use a single lens, say 35mm or 50mm, when I determine the distance between camera and the actors in this model, I will know the length of movements of all the characters. For Fish and Cat we had a model of the filming location and used different colour pins for our actors. Each night after the rehearsal on location, we would sit around the model and determine the location of each actor and sometimes would make changes, determine the camera movement and so on. Another similarity between our method of filmmaking and theatre is that between rehearsal and recording there is an interval where we can experiment with trial and error and make small changes.
NA: In theatre’s case, it’s between performances.
SM: Yes, we rehearse for over a month and can record the rehearsal with a light camera and continuously watch the rushes and see if the placement of the actors and Mise-en-scène is working. These rehearsals, recordings and watching the recordings replace storyboards.
It’s interesting when we talk about that era that I think our imagination was stronger than what we experienced when watching movies. I mean reading about the plots of films in magazines, hearing about the films from others, or even from seeing stills and posters of movies, we created an image of the film which was more compelling than actually watching the film…”
–Shahram Mokri
Invasion was akin to a mathematical problem which the audience had to resolve. When Shahram sent you the structure, how did you add your narrative layers to it?
NA: Prior to Invasion we had worked on a script called Zero. That had a similar structure which you have described as a mathematical problem, but a different story. We never got to make that film as it was a difficult production and when the opportunity arose to make another film, we tried to use that structure but with a different story. That’s how we came to Invasion. Before sending me the structure for Invasion, Shahram told me about an idea he had about a genre movie concerning a virus in an apocalyptic setting. We talked a lot about this idea and watched many movies and then he sent me something like a treatment which marked all the crossing points. From our discussions I knew what material I need to put from point A to B. I would send several options to Shahram and he would pick one. We would then try out that and carry on like this till we were both satisfied.
SM: For me Invasion is our most complex movie. Both because of its structure and due to mathematics! Its structure was based on a mathematical equation which limited us and wouldn’t allow some of the scenes to be shorter or longer and so on. So perhaps it looks like a very rigid film. I recall that a festival selector described it as an impenetrable cube, adding that it’s a heavy and difficult cube without any orifices to enter it! It was probably our most challenging film. We would discuss fine details and Nasim would suggest something and I’d say that the film’s structure doesn’t allow us to focus more on that character and make that moment longer. Everything needed to fit within that equation.
Careless Crime was labelled by many as a political film due to its subject. Why did you select that cinema fire as the basis for your film?
SM: The burning of the Rex Cinema was an event which had occupied my mind from my childhood. The date of that tragedy, 19th August 1978, is close to my birthdate and every year when it’s near my birthday, people talk about that event. It was a very horrific event and if like me you are interested in the history of Iranian Cinema, the incidents that have happened such as the strike by cinema owners, adding seats to cinemas well over their capacity, ending the strike by showing a film by Masud Kimiai, make for a fascinating prelude to that event. Then there is the concept of a political film, or films about politics and how to make a political film, or whether making a film itself can be a political act. These have been subject of many discussions concerning cinema theories. I think the Rex Cinema tragedy had many of the elements that interest us: history, cinema, stories set in a specific time and a debt to cinema. All these things directed us towards this story.
NA: For me the subject of Careless Crime is very interesting and it’s very rare that we have talked about it. I want to highlight something that Shahram was doing. In the film’s scenes the time goes forward and backward. The shot is showing real time, but the time of the story can go backwards using flashbacks that happen in a few frames ahead. For me this was a fascinating idea which always attracts me and even now retains its magic. At that time I was working with a Swiss theatrical group. They were working on a play about Zahhak (an ancient Iranian legend with snakes on his shoulders) and I was working on a play about William Tell. I was looking for a historical political killing in our history. Interestingly the Swiss group couldn’t find such a murder and told me they cannot find a politically motivated murder in their history! Whereas our history is full of political assassinations. I recall that I talked to Shahram about this and said it would be interesting if we could put such a historical event within the structure that he had composed. We are always talking about history while moving forward in time and it would be fascinating that while moving forward, we go back in history. This is the same concept that we have been discussing about how we are repeating history while moving forward in time. Then we thought about using an actual historical event and Shahram’s love of genre movies and his fascination with the Rex Cinema event, directed us to what became Careless Crime.
This idea of re-enactment of a historical crime, in this case a scene from an Iranian movie showing a political assassination, also appears in Black Rabbit, White Rabbit.
SM: When talking about Black Rabbit, White Rabbit I am very careful not to provide any spoilers, so it’s difficult for me to talk about it. We have again continued with what is understood by remaking. In Invasion also the police are trying to re-enact a crime scene. In Black Rabbit, White Rabbit we are again reenacting the past in present, but in a way to make present and past indistinguishable from each other. Also, the film’s theme provides us with the opportunity to look at cinema itself as the mathematical problem, not saying that we ignore cinema as a medium, and use it to study what’s around us, but to turn the mathematical problem into the medium that is cinema. I have tried out this idea in several of my films and it has become more prominent since Invasion. The same thing happens in Careless Crime. In the movie an audience are watching a film called Careless Crime and is about reenacting an event that took place in Rex Cinema. We have tried to do this in Black Rabbit, White Rabbit too but I think a little bit more inventive. When we are using the medium of cinema, we should remember that we have not yet explored all its potential. For me the concept of cinema is an unfinished one and I think it still has untapped potential for telling new stories.
Is using a long take, single shot in your movies always a starting point in your screenplays or is it possible that you write a script and then decide whether to do it that way?
SM: I think the two go together. I always use the example of songwriting. When writing a song, you may simultaneously think of a lyric and a rhythm to accompany it. It’s of course possible that you have the lyrics and you put music on it or vice versa. But what is on my mind is how you can do both at the same time. Therefore, I cannot tell you for certain which comes first but I think that my inquisitiveness about a single shot, long take is unfinished. I think that for the past one hundred years cinema has played around with various forms of editing and number and duration of the cuts. Of course, there have also been experiments with long takes but not as much as the other forms. Therefore, I’m keen to explore my ideas within a long take format. I also think that long takes draw attention to the difficulty that those behind the camera are experiencing and this increases the attention of the audience to the medium of cinema. So perhaps my interest in long takes could be because it is concurrently drawing attention to behind the scenes in filmmaking.
How much has your theatre experience affected on the scripts that you write with Shahram?
NA: I think it affects due to the fact that in theatre we do not have editing. When you decide on a scene, you are choosing its destiny and cannot do anything further during the performance. The same thing happens in our scripts. They are so fixed that when we want to change a location, we have to rewrite the whole script. We cannot change a dialogue because everything has been timed. Same thing happens in theatre. We time how long it takes an actor to say a dialogue and how fast or slow they should deliver it. You must decide all these as there is no editing on the stage. I think this is the most important take that we bring from the theatre.
Yes, for example, in Pinter’s plays the pauses are very important.
NA: Exactly. I remember that one of the Tajik actors asked us: why do I need to be on the set for four complete days when I only have three lines of dialogue? I have memorised them and it only takes me a few seconds to say them. Whereas in theatre the actors are aware that they may be sitting around, in and out of scenes, for the entire play even though they only have one or two lines of dialogue. They must be present in all the rehearsals. They understand that even though they are just sitting silently, the audience are looking at them. When Shahram and I write a screenplay, we include that that actor is present in that scene. We have the master shot in our mind and know that even if we have one follow shot from a person, someone else is walking in another direction. These come from theatre experience.
How was your experience of working with actors from Tajikistan?
SM: Our principal Tajik actors were experienced theatre actors and were very professional. Our main problem was with the supporting cast and the extras. In Tajikistan the concept of extras in movies does not yet exist. So, we used ordinary unskilled workers who were paid on a daily basis. To make them understand that they must come every day for a month, be customed, made up and where to sit, when and where to move, was a major challenge which we hadn’t prepared for. The cinema industry in Tajikistan is still in its infancy and therefore they have not yet thought about things like extras. I had to put all my energy towards making sure that the extras knew their places, moved at the right time in the right direction, not look into the camera and so on. This was my biggest nightmare.
I recall that in Fish and Cat, after many rehearsals, it took four takes for everything to go satisfactorily. Didn’t the Tajik actors and extras ask why they have to keep repeating the same movements?
SM: I think that’s still a puzzle for them and they have to watch the movie to find out! Babak Karimi used to say that it’s like an amusement park, they come every day, do certain things and ask themselves, what the hell I am doing?! It was a strange process. Explaining my way of filmmaking even to those who are familiar with my films is not easy and to those who are not familiar with my filmmaking methods is a major challenge.
NA: They used to say why are you doing another take? Was yesterday’s no good?!
SM: But the principal actors, even though they did not know how the film is going to end up, did everything that we asked them to do perfectly.
NA: They came from the theatre, so would always be ready in rehearsals and were very respectful towards the rehearsal environment.
Ali Moosavi has worked in documentary television and has written for Film Magazine (Iran), Cine-Eye (London), and Film International (Sweden).