Fellow Citizen

Many of Abbas Kiarostami’s films are built on a deceptively simple premise. In this 1983 work, he uses a telephoto lens to film a busy intersection in Tehran, where a traffic cop is tasked with letting through only cars that have a permit. This produces fascinating exchanges between the officer and the drivers, who plead with him to let them pass.

Those without a permit try to convince him that their case is special: they need to rush to a nearby hospital, for example, quickly drop something off at a shop, or simply get to work. One driver even produces an X-ray to back up his claim.

Amid the ever-growing traffic chaos, it’s the officer’s job to decide who to allow through. He is no harsh authority figure, but someone open to the inventive arguments of the motorists. Fellow Citizen offers a frequently humorous picture of this wheeling and dealing—the film can also be read as a veiled critique of the inflexible fundamentalist Islamic regime, which at the time had been in power for four years.