The Pig

We see contemporary Tehran through the eyes of Hasan, a director banned from making films and tormented by a pronounced midlife crisis, a man who lost interest in his family and fell in love with an actress whose career he helped. She has no intention of being subjected to the same prohibition as the man who discovered her, and, to his outrage, she takes roles in films made by his rivals, of whom there are fewer and fewer because a serial killer is prowling about the city and decapitating Iran's greatest directors. Oddly enough, he doesn't want to kill Hasan, which incenses him even more. Did he really mean so little? Or is he perhaps involved in the murders himself? In the running for the Golden Bear in Berlin this year, The Pig is not just an insightful portrait of Tehran-a city of masks and hypocrisy-but is above all a satire on the film community and the vanity of people in the arts, whose egos are similarly inflated no matter where in the world they're located. Mani Haghighi-the director of Modest Receptionand A Dragon Arrives!-deflates them with the precision and grace of Woody Allen's best work.