Ashkan, the Charmed Ring & Other Stories
aka Ashkan, angoshtar-e motebarek va dastan-haye digar First screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: Shahram Mokri. Cast: Saeed Ebrahimifar, Hutan Mokri, Sina Razani, Sadaf Ahmadi, Baharan Bani-Ahmadi, Reza Behbudi, Hossein Farzizade, Elham Zarenezhad. Screenplay: Shahram Mokri. In Brief:
Very much a debut, but love of film comes through, as do signs of formal and tonal gifts.
VOR:③
I might pull this down a notch if it were a U.S. indie, given familiar mix of brio and bald dates. But it land differently in Iranian film.
My next "Digging Deeper into Movies" event in Chicago, free as always, will be at 11am on October 11, once more at the downtown Alliance Française. The program, Iranian Masters, will spotlight the work of Jafar Panahi and Shahram Mokri, two stylistically and generationally different leaders in their art form, both of whose latest films will play in this year's Chicago International Film Festival, which starts on October 15.
Panahi's work is more than enough to fill a 90-minute session, but on the strength of Careless Crime, the historical drama-cum-metacinematic riddle that won Shahram Mokri second prize at the 2020 CIFF, I wanted to add him to the docket and introduce his work to more people. In truth, I'm still introducing it to myself, via this totally gorgeous Blu-ray boxset of his first four movies. I started with Ashkan, the Charmed Ring & Other Stories, an unwieldy title for what turns out to be an unwieldy but enjoyable film. Mokri's 2008 debut is a patent riff on Pulp Fiction, where a series of semi-comic criminals and charismatic chatterboxes cross over and over into each other's storylines. It's not just that, though: there's a jeweled suitcase that glows from the inside and long monologues from hipster gunmen about the impossible cool of Alain Delon. It's a fun ride, redolent as well of something like Damián Szifrón's Wild Tales, even if Mokri hasn't figured out how to make the unexpected, meticulously orchestrated cross-hatches between his stories fully pay off emotionally. It's a fun jape of a clearly promising, enthusiastic talent, with sleekly silvered black and white photography, but I wouldn't necessarily have predicted this person coming up with the prodigious Careless Crime just three movies later. I'm off now to go connect those dots!
The overtness of this ode to the Tarantino-verse, to French New Wave and post-New Wave, and to other 21st-century crime comedies around the world that tied their plots into sailor's knots is part of what I'll discuss at the "Digging Deeper" event: the historical contexts that made possible an Iranian auteur, born in the year of the Revolution, punch-drunk at young ages on U.S. indies and dubbed VHSes of Western flicks from James Bond to Racquel Welch. We'll also talk about the historical and industrial factors that have allowed that grown-up kid to be making such a novel strain of Iranian cinema that's still in dialogue with the art house masters, like Panahi, whom global film-lovers know well, but without the structures in place that can bring Mokri's work more robustly into the marketplace.
Mokri's newest film, Black Rabbit, White Rabbit, was recently announced as Tajikistan's submission to this year's Oscar race, so if only because you're an incorrigible Oscar queen, come on out on October 11th! If that's who you are, you probably know that Panahi's latest, the Palme d'or-winning It Was Just an Accident is also in the Oscar hunt but also not representing Iran. We'll open that can of worms, too. Be there or be square! Grade:B–
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
