• Creepy twin brothers, with two arms between them, in Fish & Cat

Shahram Mokri’s Fish & Cat—the revelation of this year’s Festival of Films From Iran—has all the makings of a cult classic. The film has the novel distinction of being the first Iranian slasher movie, and it’s also an astonishing formal achievement. Fish & Cat unfolds in a 130-minute single shot that repeatedly violates the common assumption that continuous takes preserve the flow of real time; it contains numerous flashbacks and flash-forwards, often cycling back to the same events to find that major details have changed. Stimulating, brilliantly acted, and sharply funny, the film announces the 36-year-old Mokri as a true original. I hope a U.S. distributor picks it up for general release—it’s sure to be one of my favorite movies that plays Chicago this year.

The movie circles back over the same events several times, but things never occur exactly the same way twice. It’s never clear whether we’re seeing the same story as seen by different characters or different stories entirely.

Before I started writing the script, I drew a map with two overlapping circles. The bigger circle represented the first half of the film, and the smaller circle was the second half. From there, I started looking for points where I could connect the two. I wrote lots of short stories about the individual characters, which I then inserted into the bigger picture. Now the big and little circles are not exactly the same story, but the actors and actresses are the same [characters] in both. That’s the kind of thing that’s possible only in quantum theory.

In Iran, we’re used to danger being around the corner. When we’re in a car, we’re ready for a crash. When we’re in a bank, we’re ready for a robbery. There’s always a chance we’ll be attacked by Israel or who knows where else. Our lives are very tense, even when everything is good. I wanted to show that in the film. Also I think that young people in Iran have come to expect bad things from the older generation. Veterans of the Iran-Iraq War have an easier time getting jobs—in the cities, in the country, in government—since war experience has practically holy significance in my country. People of that generation who were of fighting age during the war, they think that Iran is their place. The bad guys in Fish & Cat fought in the war, so they think of the woods as their zone. They don’t understand why the students want to be there.

In the end, we were able to show the movie in Iran with only a few minor changes, and the release was limited to small cinema salons. I was OK with that, because it was important for me that people in Iran could see it at all. The people who saw Fish & Cat liked it—it played for four months at the salons.