14

FRIDAY

When an ex-policeman arrived to audition for one of Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s films, the two men recognized each other: Twenty years earlier, in the name of the Islamic Revolution, Makhmalbaf had stabbed the cop; the director-to-be was in turn shot, imprisoned, and tortured. The men’s latter-day meeting led to the kind of deal they just don’t make in Hollywood: Makhmalbaf and his former antagonist would each cast a young man to play his ’70s self, and they would direct these actors in a dramatization of the duo’s clash. The result is hardly the Tehran equivalent of an episode of Cops. As the title suggests, A Moment of Innocence finds the personal motivations beneath the sweeping political passions of mid-’70s Iran. Still, the film’s offhand quality is misleading. The play of reality and re-enactment leads to some gently comic moments, but also to a powerful realization. At 8 p.m. at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s Ring Auditorium, 7th and Independence Avenue SW. Free. (202) 357-2700. (Mark Jenkins)