A documentary film about a boys school in Iran. The film shows numerous, funny and moving interviews of many different young pupils of this school summoned by their superintendent for questions of discipline. The man is not severe, but clever and fair. He teaches loyalty, fellowship and righteousness to these boys. Besides these interviews, we see scenes of this school’s quotidian life.

Hassan Darabi, a troublesome, amoral 10-year-old boy in a small Iranian town wishes to see the Iran national football team play an important match in Tehran. In order to achieve that, he scams his friends and neighbors.

After the earthquake of Guilan, a film director and his son travel to the devastated area to search for the actors from the movie the director made there a few years previously. In their search, they see how people who have lost everything in the earthquake still have hope and try to live life to the fullest.

1987 film by Abbas Kiarostami

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.

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.

A sense of order is the necessary basis of any good social organisation. To illustrate this axiom, Kiarostami presents a series of paired scenes in this educational short film in which the same action is first shown in an organised way and then in an anarchic one. The film crew, however, finds it difficult to organise disorder.