Two men meet again after twenty years: a police officer who once took a knife wound at his post, and the filmmaker who, as a teenager, held the knife. Makhmalbaf's 1996 feature turns that reunion into a film about its own making.
What is Nun va Goldoon about?
A man in plain clothes turns up where Mohsen Makhmalbaf is casting and introduces himself as the officer wounded on a Tehran street in 1974. He wants no apology; he wants a part. The director agrees to rebuild that day, and the production splits in two: Makhmalbaf coaches the boy standing in for the policeman, while the policeman coaches Ali Bakhsi, the youth cast as the teenage director. Their versions refuse to line up. One remembers a girl greeted each morning and a flower pot; the other remembers instructions, a cousin, and a piece of bread. The camera stays with the preparations — costume, alley, wording — until the two doubles must face each other.
About the cast
The film is cast from the people it concerns rather than around stars. Mirhadi Tayebi, the officer from the original incident, plays his older self and also directs his own double. Makhmalbaf appears as himself, working in the open inside his own story. Ali Bakhsi, a first-time performer, takes the harder job: reproducing a stranger's seventeen-year-old past. The younger players are largely non-professionals, which gives the rehearsal scenes a documentary rhythm.
Context & significance
Nun va Goldoon, released abroad as A Moment of Innocence, was completed in 1996 as an Iran-France co-production and runs seventy-eight minutes. It arrived in the most reflexive stretch of Makhmalbaf's career, between Salaam Cinema and Gabbeh, and belongs to a wider 1990s Iranian practice of building films out of their own making — the ground Abbas Kiarostami covered with Close-Up. The event behind it dates to 1974, when Makhmalbaf was seventeen; the arrest that followed led to a prison term ending in 1978. The picture keeps that history at the level of biography rather than argument. It travelled the festival circuit widely and remains a well regarded title among viewers to this day.
Watching Nun va Goldoon on K-Time
Nun va Goldoon streams on K-Time. This page is open to read, while playback asks for a free K-Time account login. Menus, search, and title cards are laid out Farsi-first for viewers watching from outside Iran, the film runs in its original Persian audio, and one account keeps your place across screens.