TEHRAN – The Brooklyn Academy of Music plans to review movies by Iranian filmmaker Shahram Mokri during a special program beginning Friday.

Screenings will be followed by question and answer sessions, which will be attended by Mokri, the academy has announced. 

His latest drama “Careless Crime”, which won the Premio Bisato d’Oro for Best Original Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, is one of the films selected to be screened during the weeklong program.

In this film, Mokri’s mind-bending mystery merges past with present and fact with fiction inspired by a real-life tragedy, the infamous Cinema Rex fire in 1978. 

The academy has called “Careless Crime” “a mysterious puzzle box, equal parts Abbas Kiarostami and Chris Marker.”

The program also features “Invasion”. Sports, murder and a swirl of overlapping identities and reality comprise Mokri’s third film. The time-bending, single-shot experiment and hybrid science fiction-detective-vampire story is set in a future dystopia, with nods to stylized 1980s New Wave-era films like “Liquid Sky”.

“Fish & Cat” and “Ashkan, the Charmed Ring and Other Stories” will also be reviewed.

In “Fish & Cat”, young Iranian kite-flying enthusiasts gather at a dismal lake, near a restaurant with grisly fare straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Mokri’s eerie, circular, dream-like second feature, inspired by a true story, is a brilliantly unclassifiable, single-shot meditation on 1970s American slasher films filtered through an arthouse lens. 

It is the winner of the Venice Film Festival Special Prize for Innovative Content.

“Ashkan, the Charmed Ring and Other Stories” is Mokri’s first feature. It is a delightfully offbeat black-and-white comedy about interconnected strangers and the mysterious workings of fate, played out in deadpan Jim Jarmusch-like vignettes. 

In its announcement for the film, the Brooklyn Academy of Music has said, “Watch for sly references to film noir classics in this eccentric Iranian gem.”

Photo: Abolfazl Kahani in a scene from “Careless Crime” directed by Shahram Mokri.

MMS/YAW