2017 film directed by Abbas Kiarostami

After returning from an errand to get bread, a young boy encounters a dog that frightens him making the journey to get home more difficult than he could’ve imagined.

The second movie of Kiarostami, made in 1972. It calls in my mind some of the very first movies of Brakhage, especially The Way to Shadow Garden. In both cases, a minimalistic gem, nothing explained, a personage without history, without motivation, with the unique role of putting in value a disconcerting universe. Is it the admirable end of Breaktime a negative stasis (like in the movie of Brakhage)? Well, it is somehow a way to the Gardens of Shadow, too, though I think it is, much more, something else: it is an end refusing to be the end (as the movie actually has no beginning, also). This fourteen minutes movie dares to eliminate the story from its structure! It is a shame that Breaktime passed unobserved, because it was marking a new age in the history of cinema.

During breaktime, Dara and Nader have a fierce argument about a torn exercise book that the former has given back to the latter. There are two possible outcomes, which the film shows one after the other. One is that Dara wants to get his own back, and the two boys start a violent fight; the other is that they work together to mend the exercise book with a little glue.

An old man with a hearing aid tires of listening to the noises of the town. But when he takes his aid out he can't hear his grandchildren coming to see him.