In a boys' elementary school, young Bardiya and Taha get into a fight that ends in disaster. Bardiya is now under police custody, while the rest of the students and the teachers are being questioned. In writer/director Siavash Shahabi’s Tashrih (Dissect), we follow the boys’ teacher as he tries to make sense of the tragedy and the role he played in it.

Dissect possesses an interesting structure. When the film opens, we experience the altercation from the kids’ perspective, watching them reenact the fight. Omniscience is denied the audience, so viewers, like the police, are also trying to gather clues—at this point, the reenactment is all we have. Bypassing conventional exposition, we are thrown into the ongoing investigation and left to pick up information along the way. Some, from what is said, but mostly from the characters’ behavior, most notably from the main character of the short, the boys’ teacher.

[caption id="attachment_37319" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Audience understanding of he inciting event is filled in via character testimony and post-hoc reenactments.

Audience understanding of he inciting event is filled in via character testimony and post-hoc reenactments.

Understanding of the inciting event is filled in via character testimony and post-hoc reenactments.[/caption]

The mystery of what happened provides enough intrigue to sustain one's attention and, despite the 20-minute runtime, the pacing of the film creates and maintains effective tension. The screenplay, by Shahabi as well, is smartly structured so that as the narrative evolves a switch occurs and the film relies less and less on trying to figure out what has happened and more on the teacher struggling to understand how and why it happened—and to what degree he could have prevented it.

This sense of moral crisis is a quality that, in our experience, is a hallmark of Iranian short cinema, yet has a distinctive flavor in Dissect. The film distinguishes itself by being more about what the instructor has not done rather than his explicit actions. Yet, he can’t shake his sense of culpability in the matter, especially as details of the fight come to light. Alireza Sanifar’s performance as the teacher is quite impressive as he is able to portray how his character processes the trauma and escalating responsibility largely without dialogue. His navigation of the character's inner turmoil provides a resounding authenticity that gives the film a strong emotional impact.

Dissect made its way around the festival circuit back in 2019 with notable stops at the Palm Springs ShortFest, Krakow, Tirana and it won the Grand Prix at the Tehran International Film Festival. We're pleased to welcome it online for the first time today!