Combining fantasy and reality, fate and freewill, Shahram Mokri’s spiralling and surreal story involves a girl, a gun, a movie set, and so much more. Multiple stories merge, including a movie within a movie within a movie, in a playful and often mesmerizing puzzle. At the center is Babak, a set designer who is working on his 40th production with ill-fated superstition that something tragic is about to happen. Long takes weave together subsidiary narratives–an errant gun, an aspiring actor, a woman injured in a car accident–into a filmic Möbius strip.

Curated & presented in partnership with Mizna, SWANA Stories at MSPIFF presents bold and striking new films from North Africa, Southwest Asia, and the diaspora.