The Actor

New film by the maker of Once Upon a Time, Cinema, screened last year in Rotterdam. The Actor is just as bizarre and intriguing and has the same absurdist humour and drama.The popular film actor Akbar Abdi (played by Akbar Abdi, the popular film actor), has always wanted to perform in a serious art film - 'à la Chaplin' but circumstances, mainly financial, have so far forced him to play only in commercial films. However Abdi now decides for once and for all never to perform in a commercial film again. However then his wife has an idea to make it possible for the couple to have a child after all. She shall look for a woman for Abdi who will marry him, on condition that she then gives up the child - for money of course. So Abdi's artistic pretensions still come to nothing.Dream images are mixed with images from everyday life, which are no less strange, in a sequence of separate and sometimes nightmare tragi-comic scenes. The line linking all Makhmalbaf's films is his interest in the outcasts of the world, society's underdogs. And he always expresses doubts about and objections to progress and as such he is typical of Iranian society, that seems to ask continuously: how do I remain faithful to traditional values in a drastically changing world?