Agora Films

Tajikistan/United Arab Emirates | 2025 | 139′ | Color

Festivals:

Busan International Film Festival – 2025 (Vision Asia Competition)
BFI London Film Festival – 2025 (Official Selection Competition)
Chicago International Film Festival – 2025

About the film:

A suspicious film prop, a mysterious audition, a conspiratorial road incident and multiple rabbits are woven together in this bold and beguiling drama from Tajikistan.
A film armorer suspects a fake firearm is real. An actor arrives on set demanding a role. A car crash victim fears her accident was deliberate. Three seemingly disparate stories weave into an enigmatic whole, with flowing, expertly choreographed takes, no small amount of droll humour and flashes of magic realism punctuating Iranian director Shahram Mokri’s playful, subtly provocative meta-mystery.

About the director:

Born in Iran in 1978, Shahram Mokri is a director and writer who graduated from the Tehran Soore University of Film. He began his career directing short films such as Dragonfly Storm (2002) and Ando-C (2007). His feature debut Fish & Cat (2013) won the Special Award in the Orizzonti section at the Venice Film Festival. The director went on to direct Invasion (2017), which screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Careless Crime (2020), which was screened at Venice and won the Jury Prize at the Chicago International Film Festival. Black Rabbit, White Rabbit is his fourth feature film.

Press Quotes:

– Oscars: Tajikistan Submits Film ‘Black Rabbit, White Rabbit’. Hollywood Reporter
– Mokri is more interested in game-playing and systematically removing the walls between the fictional movies and his constructed reality. Filmmaker Magazine
– Shahram Mokri’s captivating fifth feature, Black Rabbit, White Rabbit, plays around with film as a storytelling medium with fascinating and engaging results. Loud and Clear Review
– Iranian filmmaker Shahram Mokri has transformed the Möbius strip into a cinematic form of its own, extending beyond the familiar framework of time loop narratives. Screen Anarchy
– Mokri isn’t chasing coherence so much as tracing the ways stories collapse under their own weight, rewriting one another in ways no camera can fully capture. Upcoming
– Directed by Iranian filmmaker Shahram Mokri, this sly, skilfully directed meta-puzzle plays like a wayward offspring of David Lynch’s Inland Empire or the work of Charlie Kaufman. The Reviews Hub
– Long, sinuous, uncut shots make this clever meta-movie a delight. Chicago Sun Times