Vahid Mobasseri

An unassuming mechanic, Vahid, has a chance encounter with a man he suspects to be his former sadistic jailhouse captor, Eghbal. Panicked, Vahid kidnaps the man and rounds up a few of his fellow ex-prisoners to try and confirm the man's identity. As the bickering group drives around Tehran with the captive, they must confront how far to take matters with their presumed tormentor.

In his new virtuosic sleight-of-hand—completed shortly before his imprisonment in July 2022—Jafar Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, who has relocated to a rural border town in Iran to remotely direct a new film in nearby Turkey. While there, he finds himself thrust in the middle of a local scandal, confronting the opposing pulls of tradition and progress.