Writers: Nasim Ahmadpour and Shahram Mokri.
Director: Shahram Mokri
Directed by Iranian filmmaker Shahram Mokri, this sly, skilfully directed meta-puzzle—Tajikistan’s 2026 Oscar entry for Best International Feature Film—plays like a wayward offspring of David Lynch’s Inland Empire or the work of Charlie Kaufman. The film catapults us onto the set of a classic Iranian film remake, where performance and reality collapse into one another amid possibly sentient props, conspiracies, characters in rabbit costumes, and a literal, vengeful Chekhov’s gun on the rampage.
The film opens with a gun trade gone wrong—a tensely staged and absurd exchange that we soon realise is a scene from the film-within-the-film. From there, Mokri unspools a Möbius-strip narrative that follows a motley ensemble whose stories twist, loop, and fold back on themselves. An increasingly exasperated prop master, Bezhan (brilliantly played by Bezhan Davlyatov), grows convinced that one of the pistols on set isn’t a prop at all. Meanwhile, Sara (Hasti Mohammai)—an actress playing a woman recovering from a suspicious crash and uncertain who she is—drifts through the production in a Lynchian daze, as though suspended between the film world and the real one. Another thread follows Donya (Kibriyo Dilyobova), an aspiring actress defying her mother, who turns up unexpectedly on set demanding an audition, alongside assorted crew members swept into the production’s increasingly tangled surreality.
This looping structure becomes fertile ground for Kafkaesque absurdity as we tumble like Alice down its many rabbit holes. Mokri’s affection for Béla Tarr’s long takes is evident in the fluid, brilliantly staged camerawork, which seamlessly moves us from one reality into another and keeps us immersed in the complex mechanics of this collapsing meta-universe. The film’s texture is one of visual playfulness and unbridled chaos: characters encounter their doubles, step out of one scene only to find they’re still inside another film; events double back, loops recur, and backgrounds reveal themselves as set walls. The film is alternately whip-smart about the creative process and deliriously, stupendously silly. As the audience, we are never sure whether we’re watching the movie being made or the external reality of the film set.
This tension between real and unreal is mined not only for comedy but also for unease and artistic self-scrutiny. The director of the film-within-the-film—who shares his name with the real-life filmmaker—struggles to maintain control, turning the work into a winking, reflexive study of authorship and creative chaos. By the end, the film’s many repetitions slightly dull the edge of its initially playful conceit, as both the real and fictional directors seem to lose their grip on the spiralling structure and rule-bending narrative games. Despite its eventual loss of focus, it remains a dexterous and witty satire on filmmaking, and a through-the-looking-glass glimpse at the mania and pitfalls of the creative process.
Black Rabbit, White Rabbit is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
