Director Jafar Panahi

Set in Iran and filmed without official permission. A family man accidentally runs over a dog (“just an accident”) and damages his car. While it is being repaired, he is seen by a car mechanic, who believes he recognises him as the man who tortured him in prison some years before. He kidnaps the interrogator and intends to kill him, but doubts creep in: is he mistaken in his identification? He never saw the man, for he was always blindfolded. He knows only the voice, the smell and the sound made by the prosthetic leg – experiences he can never forget. Over the course of a day and a night he drives around with other past victims of the interrogator as they try to decide what to do with him.

It’s a tense, varied film – sometimes almost comic, sometimes almost disquisitional, frequently chilling. It implies that there is no end in sight to the violence: the trauma and suffering of the regime’s victims against the sense of righteousness of the regime’s officials. There is kindness and goodness, but also fanaticism, a desire for revenge and a generalised corruption (e.g. security guards with their own card readers for backhanders). It was quite brilliant – and the ending caught me off-guard.